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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



''MONSIEUR HENRI" 

A FOOT-NOTE TO 
FRENCH HISTORY BY 
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 







NEW YORK HARPER 6- BROTHERS 
PRINTERS 6- PUBLISHERS MDCCCXCII 



DC 212 

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Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 



TO 

MADAME MARIE-ANGE BONDROIT 
R.S.CJ. 

When you were first an exile, and at Elm- 
hurst, I was a child. Six studious years we 
had together, many games, a tiff or two, much 
silent love. It is because I do not forget any 
of them, and because it may stand as a little 
token of an honorable and lifelong debt, that to 
you, my dear old friend, without asking your 
leave, I dedicate this book. 



" I have looked narrowly into this war of La Vendue, 
full as it is of scenes and faces ; I have thought of it 
by day, and dreamed of it by night. It is not cold, 
commonplace war, waged for ambition and policy, 
nor for commercial advantage ; it is a war deep- 
rooted in the soil and in the conscience of man ; a 
war all for family and fatherland, in the antique im- 
passioned way ; a Homeric war, inspiring dread and 
admiration, pity and love. . . . Everything in it calls 
for the palette and the lyre."— A Republican officer, 
quoted by Abbe Deniau, Histoire de la Guerre de 
la Vendee. 

"And mark you, undemonstrative men would have 
spoiled the situation. The finest action is the better 
for a piece of purple." — Robert Louis Stevenson, 
in The English A dmirals. 



PREFACE. 




.O little concerning the 
French provincial struggle 
of the eighteenth century 
has found an echo in our 
language, that the British 
Museum and the Bodleian Library have 
not three original references between 
them to add to the local archives (most 
of them, alas ! still confused and uncata- 
logued), of the Bibliotheque Nationale. 
Madame de La Rochejaquelein's beauti- 
ful Memoires still serve as the basis for 
whatever may be said on the subject; 
and where I have differed from her by a 
hair, it has not been without reluctance, 
and the comparison of many oracles. 
I do not plead for pardon in treating 



an all-but-hallowed theme in a rather 
high-handed fashion, since every grain 
here has been painfully sifted and weigh- 
ed, and the material, if not the propor- 
tioning of it, is true as truth. But in so 
treating it, I bore in mind that excision 
is the best safeguard against decay, that 
time throws away as rag and bobtail the 
political specifications thought to be 
precious, and that we must at once, and 
in the nobler sense, romanticize such 
dry facts as we mean shall live. 

It is always the character of the man 
which vitalizes the event; what did or 
did not happen is, ultimately, of minor 
importance beside the spectacle of a 
strong soul. A background may be 
blurred for the sake of a single figure. 
I tried, therefore, to paint a portrait, 
willing to abide by the hard saying of 
Northcote : " If a portrait have force, it 
will do for history." 

To the Rev. Walter Elliott, editor of 



The Catholic World, who allows me thus 
to incorporate and remodel a sketch 
first contributed to its pages ; to Mon- 
sieur le Cure and Monsieur le Vicaire of 
Saint-Aubin-de-Baubigne, who, for the 
sake of the immortal Red Handkerchief 
unknown to English literature, bright- 
ened my frosty travels in the old Bo- 
cage ; to Madame la Comtesse de Chabot 
of Boissiere ; to Mademoiselle de Chabot, 
Henri's young kinswoman and annalist, 
whose ardent researches have verified 
many of the data I give, and to Monsieur 
de Chabot, also, who drew for his sister's 
soldierly book the admirable chart now 
kindly lent me for transmarine use, I re- 
turn, this late, my faithful and ever affec- 
tionate thanks. L, I. G. 

London, 1891. 



"MONSIEUR HENRI": 

A FOOT-NOTE TO FRENCH HISTORY. 




lEFORE a crowd of excited 
farmers, a young French- 
man, blond, enthusiastic, 
delicately- nurtured, made 
once this singular oration : 
" Friends ! if my father were here, you 
would have confidence. As for me, I am 
only a boy, but I will prove that I deserve 
to lead you. When I advance, do you 
follow me ; when I flinch, cut me down ; 
when I fall, avenge me !" Then amid the 
cheers and tears of peasants, he sat in the 
great court -yard of his father's aban- 
doned house, and munched with them 
their coarse brown loaves. It was the 



first slight sign of his consecration to a 
cause. He had spoken famous words, 
hardly to be matched in history; words 
which have travelled far and wide, and 
proclaimed his spirit where his name is 
utterly unknown. Yesterday he was a 
carpet-knight ; now, like " gallant Mur- 
ray " in the song, 

" His gude sword he hath drawn it, 
And hath flung the sheath awa'." 

There was no retrogression. Henri du 
Vergier de La Rochejaquelein, twenty 
years old, a little indolent hitherto, an 
athlete, a critic of horses, and hounds, 
was suddenly shaken out of his velvet 
privacy into the rude lap of the Revo- 
lution. 

He was born in the village of Saint 
Aubin de Baubigne, near Chatillon-sur- 
Sevre, in the broad-moated, wood-sur- 
rounded feudal castle of La Durbelliere, 
on the thirtieth of August, 1772. He 



came of fighting stock. Among the an- 
cestors of his name there were Crusad- 
ers, two warriors slain under Francis I. 
at Pavia, and a dear brother-in-arms of 
Henry of Navarre, who was wounded 
beside him on the battle-field of Arques. 
Henri's father, the Marquis Henri-Louis- 
Auguste, died of the opening of an old 
scar in 1802, after able service in San Do- 
mingo, where he was defeated, with his 
English allies, by the blacks and the forces 
of Spain ; his wife, a proprietress there, 
described in the parish books at home 
as "the high and powerful lady Con- 
stance-Lucie-Bonne de Caumont Dade," 
was destined to survive her son also, but 
not long. They were the parents of two 
other sons and of four daughters, of all 
of whom it is perfect eulogy to say that 
they were alike. Henri, the second child 
and eldest boy, was intended for the 
military profession : while the supreme 
political storm was brewing he was com- 



pleting his studies at Soreze. This fa- 
mous school in Lower Languedoc was 
just then, under the benignant rule of 
Dom Despaulx, in its prime. In the 
great plain under the shadow of Pepin's 
Tower, the Benedictines could marshal 
their four hundred boys, in blue uni- 
forms faced with red. Henri was prob- 
ably something less than an enthusiast 
in botany and dancing (for all the arts 
had excellent show at Soreze), but gentle 
as he was, he had no disrelish for the 
novitiate of war. He must have appre- 
hended, even at the still college where, 
long after, the radical Republican, Pere 
Lacordaire, set his bust to smile down 
upon the bent heads of the study hall, 
what strange transatlantic winds were 
already blowing over France. He look- 
ed forward always to a campaign, to 
spurs and sabres, and some mighty Jer- 
icho to assail. Courage he had as a 
birthright; the splendid animal non- 



5 

chalance in face of danger, and, later, in 
a measure almost as ample, the forti- 
tude of soul which " endures and is pa- 
tient." He went directly from school to 
Landrecy in 1785, joining the garrison 
as sub - lieutenant, his first commission 
being in the Royal Polish regiment, of 
which his father was then colonel. The 
marquis, a person of worth and fortune^ 
had every reason to be pleased with his 
pretty cavalryman of thirteen, who had 
to get along as he could, without public 
favors, and who was treated with com- 
plimentary strictness. 

Henri became one of the constitutional 
guard at Versailles, which had replaced 
the household body-guard of Louis XVI., 
and six years later, when this was dis- 
banded, he remained in Paris, by order 
of the King. His lodgings were in the 
Rue Jacob. On Friday, the terrible tenth 
of August, 1792, he was in the Tuileries, 
and narrowly escaped with his life ; his 



companion, Charles D'Autichamp, cross- 
ing the bridge over the Seine, killed 
several men in his own defence. It is 
likely that Henri forced his way on 
a run through the great alley of the 
Champs Elysees, or found passage at the 
Queen's garden -gate, where most who 
ventured were struck down ; for he was 
not with those who went with Choiseul, 
sword in hand, on that ever-dramatic day, 
to join their master under the protection 
of the Assembly. Louis-Marie de Sal- 
gues, the young Marquis of Lescure, a 
cousin of the La Rochejaqueleins, reach- 
ed Tours safely with his wife, along a 
road marshalled with forty thousand 
hostile troops; he owed his escape to 
the romantic gratitude of Thomassin, 
Parisian commissary of police, whose 
pupil he had been. Haggard, wearied, 
wrought to the pitch of anxiety, they fled 
unawares into the heart of revolt and dis- 
turbance. La Durbelliere was deserted ; 



the family of La Rochejaqueleiii had emi- 
grated, during the preceding December, 
to Germany ; the parish had gone over to 
the will of the majority. Lescure, shel- 
tered at his chateau of Clisson, in Bois- 
me, Poitou, sent for his homeless kins- 
man. Thither, evading a series of perils, 
Henri went, stepping in among a strange 
huddled group of royalists i men of re- 
sources, like Bernard de Marigny, with 
his large joyousness of nature ; men like 
the giddy, whimpering old Chevalier de 
La Cassaigne, who got the whole house 
into trouble by his officiousness, and 
whose name is often indulgently replaced 
by a blank ; aristocrats, abbesses, nota- 
ries, old tutors, servants, distant rela- 
tives, and proscribed children, keeping 
vigil over the dying hopes of conserva- 
tive France. Few rumors reached them 
of the fighting in Anjou ; they ventured 
out into the roads but seldom, as the 
doors were jealously watched. They 



were of one heart and mind, undergoing 
agonies of suspense, and anon cheering 
one another with fireside tales, with in- 
door games and music. Marigny, the 
kind giant of a cousin, with his maskings 
and recitations, his mimicry of divers 
ages, conditions, and dialects, kept them 
alive with laughter. But Henri was the 
true centre of interest ; all relied upon 
him, quiet and reserved as he was ; from 
first to last he somehow made a moral 
brightness in the sombre lapses of those 
days. He was no courtier; "he had 
lived," says the woman then Lescure's 
bride, "but little in the world." Here, 
through her, we have the earliest glimpse 
of his tall and comely figure, of his 
wheaten-yellow hair, his healthful color, 
his animated eyes, " his contour English 
rather than French." 

Like a thunder-clap came the news of 
the King's death. It had been provided 
that word should be sent to Clisson of 



any impending rescue. Not a hand worth 
counting had been raised to save him. 
Lescure and La Rochejaquelein looked 
at each other in profound grief and dis- 
may ; and among the twenty-five men in 
the chateau capable of bearing arms, the 
spark of desperate merriment flickered 
out. So they remained for months, in 
the midst of threats growing from day 
to day. Madame de Lescure was learn- 
ing to ride, as an initiation into the pos- 
sible life before her, and sat trembling 
upon the saddle, while her husband and 
Henri walked on either side over the 
greensward, supporting her, and comfort- 
ing her tears. Henri began to be more 
moody and preoccupied, saying little. 
He traversed the country alone, often 
facing and surmounting danger with his 
consummate physical skill, sometimes 
hiding, or galloping madly to the woods. 
On one occasion gendarmes made a de- 
scent on Clisson, and carried off his fa- 



vorite horse. They told Lescure that 
"the son of Monsieur de La Rocheja- 
quelein was much more sharply suspec- 
ted " than he was. " I do not see why,'' 
Lescure replied, with his habitual direct- 
ness ; "we are relatives and fast friends; 
our opinions are quite the same." 

Citizens were summoned to the de- 
fence of Bressuire. Lescure had been 
for four years back commandant of his 
parish of Boisme. Hourly he expected 
his orders to march against his insurgent 
neighbors : there seemed no way out of 
it. The men were holding a council of 
debate, determined, at least, to make a 
passive resistance when, early in April, 
the name of La Rochejaquelein was call- 
ed to be drawn for the militia. On the 
track of this announcement followed a 
secret message, brought by a young peas- 
ant named Morin, from Henri's unmar- 
ried aunt, living in retirement some miles 
away. Chollet had been taken ; the peo- 



pie had arisen ; there were wild hopes 
that the royalist faction might get the 
upperhand. The young peasant, eager 
and breathless, fixed his glance upon 
Henri. He spoke persuasively, with a 
fervor that seemed to thrill his whole 
body. " Sir, will you draw to-morrow 
for the militia, when your farmers are 
about to fight rather than be drafted ? 
Come with us ! The whole country-side 
looks to you ; it will obey you." " God 
wills it," cried Peter the Hermit. He 
willed that God should will it, at any 
rate, and all Christendom took him at 
his word. The peasant boy had some 
spell beside eloquence, for Henri's think- 
ing was over. " Tell them that I will 
come," he answered. That night, ac- 
companied by one servant, a guide, and 
the tremulous Chevalier, afraid to stand 
his chances at Clisson, provided with a 
brace of pistols and carrying a stick, 
Henri mounted his horse and waved 



farewell. There were protestations, ar- 
guments, women's prayers and tears ; but 
he silently tightened his belt upon his 
pistols, and threw himself, at parting, 
into Lescure's arms. "Then first came 
the eagle-look into his eyes " (says the 
gentle historian of La Vendee), "which 
never left them after." 

Machecould, the Herbiers, and Chan- 
tonnay had already been seized by the 
insurgents, when Henri, racing across 
country to evade the Blues, reached the 
little army on the morrow of a nearly 
fatal victory at Chemille, whose fruits 
had to be abandoned for lack of ammu- 
nition. He turned about and made an- 
other painful journey to Mademoiselle 
Anne-Henriette de La Rochejaquelein ; 
and passed Easter there with her in the 
roomy house of charity at Saint Aubin, 
Le Rabot, which she had built in 1785 ; 
then, with a few young men, he hur- 
ried to the rebels' quarters at Tiffanges, 



whither they had withdrawn. Stofflet, 
Bonchamp, D'Elbee, even Cathehneau, 
were disheartened; they had now but 
two pounds of powder ; the shabby reg- 
iments were disbanding. Henri went 
back, brooding and restive, to Saint Au- 
bin. It seemed as if opportunity, after 
all, had failed him. But the peasants 
found him, calling upon him as " Mon- 
sieur Henri !" a plain name which is his- 
toric now, and promising that in the 
course of a day a force of ten thousand 
men should join him. He urged them 
to gather at once by night, armed only, 
alas ! with their cudgels, spits, hay-forks, 
scythes, and spades. They came in droves 
to the castle at Saint Aubin from Nueil, 
Rorthais, Echaubrognes, the Cerqueux, 
Saint Clementin, Voultegon, Somloire, 
Etusson, Izernay. Quetineau's trained di- 
vision, three thousand strong, was before 
them. They had but two hundred mus- 
kets and sixty pounds of blasting powder. 



which Henri had discovered in a mason's 
cellar. At dawn he took command, with 
the alarum on his lips. His gayety had 
come back ; he had found his post. What 
he had to say fired itself in an epigram. 
He was a little pale, but very earnest, and 
his beautiful presence was another thous- 
and men. He was only a boy, he said ; 
but if he flinched they might, at least, 
cut him down ; if he fell in battle, they 
would, at best, avenge him. And they 
stormed up together against the Au- 
biers on the seventeenth of April, 1793, 
as if in the first bustling act of a bright 
drama. 



t 



f 




HIS side-show of the great 
Revolution was a magnifi- 
cent spectacle, and unique 
in the world's annals. The 
seat of war, Vendee inili- 
taire, may be described roughly as being 
bounded on the north by the Loire from 
Saumur to the sea ; on the west by the 
Atlantic ; on the south by a line drawn 
from Sables d'Olonne across to Parthe- 
nay ; and on the east by another line from 
Parthenay up again to Saumur. It was 
then comprised in some square leagues 
of old Anjou, Poitou, and Nantes ; it is 
now divided into the four modern de- 
partments of Loire-Inferieure, Maine-et- 
Loire, Deux-Sevres, and Vendee. The 
name Vendee, at first, indeed, minor and 



i6 

local, rose and spread after the affair at 
Challans on the twelfth of March, until 
it became representative of the people 
and their cause. And Vendee, once men- 
tioned, means two things : the Marais, or 
low sea-coast district, a great meadow 
honey-combed with canals from the isl- 
and of Bouin to Saint-Hilairie-de-Rie; 
and the inland Bocage, or thicket, in its 
own way quite as inaccessible. The lat- 
ter, the centre of agitation, was settled 
by rugged, simple, honorable folk. It 
was glossy with woods of golden furze 
and pollard oaks, and broken everywhere 
with little hollows and little streams. 
It was a rough and arid place; it had 
few roads, and these were clayey and 
difficult; it was full of rocky pastures, 
hedge-rows, and trenches ; dull in color, 
crabbed in outline, niggardly of distance. 
It had not a mountain nor any consid- 
erable landmark save the Hill of Larks. 
In the narrow fiats it was all but impos- 



sible for the enemy to form ; and utterly- 
impossible for one detachment to com- 
municate with another by signals. The 
puzzling Bocage was a glorious van- 
tage-ground, however, for its own sons. 
The race which mastered it had great 
agility and nerve : Caesar had called 
them invincible. They were not of a 
volatile humor, as were their compat- 
riots in northern France ; and yet they 
moved habitually in the very gravity 
and temperance of cheerfulness. The 
patriarchal life survived among them: 
the noble divided the proceeds of 
the land with his farmers ; and he 
was his own steward, attending per- 
sonally to business, and having for 
his tenants those with whom he had 
played as a boy. The ladies' carriages 
were drawn by bullocks. On fete-days 
the wives and daughters of the hall 
danced with the peasants. After the 
Sunday services, among his devout flock 



the good curi read aloud the place of 
meeting for the week's hunts. There 
were no feuds ; a scandal was unheard 
of ; a lawsuit was a twenty years' won- 
der. The keys of the jail had taken to 
chronic rust. The shut-in Bocage had 
seen the beginnings of the national up- 
heaval with but faint concern. Its own 
clergy were poor, its own gentry mag- 
nanimous ; its liberties were entire ; it 
had no great public abuses calling for 
reform. And through the outlying dis- 
tricts things were much the same. It 
was impossible, as Jeffrey wrote soon 
after in the Quarterly, to "revolution- 
ize" a people so circumstanced. Inno- 
cent and happy as they were, it may be 
said of them that they had no history 
till the insurrection. It broke out in 
March of 1793, it was over in July of 
1795 ; and those on its soil cannot speak 
of it yet without a throb of feeling. 
It was in the main, a religious war; 



one of the few since St. Louis' in the 
thirteenth century, which has not dis- 
graced the name ; and the latest, in- 
deed, known to general history. But 
it has been affirmed too often that 
the nobles and priests, active here as 
elsewhere for the losing cause, had 
roused the masses to revolt. M. Ber- 
thre de Bourniseaux, of Thouars, a 
Republican, says earnestly, that defen- 
sive w^ar was produced by three causes, 
with none of which the influence of 
churchmen and kingsmen, as such, had 
anything to do. First, by the execra- 
ble tyranny of the Jacobins in worry- 
ing an intensely conservative section, 
which, in the proper Jacobinical jargon, 
was not " ripe " for the Revolution ; sec- 
ond, by the foolish persistent persecu- 
tion of their old faith in behalf of 
the goddess Reason — a thing borne 
long in silence and bewilderment, until 
the smouldering opposition sprang into 



the full stature of a blaze ; third, by the 
forced levy of three hundred thousand 
men. On the twenty -first of January, 
1 791, Louis, after his usual hesitation, 
signed the decree authorizing the ejec- 
tion of those vicars and curates who 
would not uphold the new civil consti- 
tution of the clergy. It may be believed 
that this stroke of national polity fell 
heavily in mid -France, where "priest- 
craft " had never figured as a word in 
any possible dictionary, and where the 
Roman obedience had been as perfectly 
established as the solar system in the 
popular mind. Says Lamartine : "The 
Revolution, until then exclusively polit- 
ical, became schism in the eyes of a 
portion of the clergy and the faithful. 
Among the bishops and priests, some 
took the civil oath, which was the guar- 
antee of their lives; others refused to 
take it, or, having taken it, retracted. 
This gave rise to trouble in many a 



mind, to agitation of conscience, and to 
division in the temple. The great ma- 
jority of parishes had now two minis- 
ters, the one a constitutional parson, 
salaried and protected by the state, the 
other refractory, refusing the oath, be- 
reft of his income, driven from his sanct- 
uary, and raising his altar in some clan- 
destine chapel or in the open field. These 
rival upholders of the same worship ex- 
communicated each other, one in the 
name of the ^ Government, one in the 
name of the Pope and the Church. . . . 
The case was not actually, as it stood, per- 
secution or civil war, but it was the sure 
prelude to both. . . . When war burst 
out, the Revolution had degenerated." 
It was not until August that the report 
of the uprising in the provinces, and the 
full sense of its significance, were accred- 
ited at Paris. Simultaneously the air 
thickened with fierce rumors from Aus- 
tria and Spain, and Dumouriez's last 



watch - lights sputtered out upon the 
frontiers. While the attention of Eu- 
rope was fixed for a moment on larger 
matters, the disbanding of ecclesiastics 
and the enrolling of conscripts engen- 
dered their natural sequence in ignored 
La Vendee, and the placid farm-country 
sprang forth prodigious, like a fireside 
spectre, menacing the fortunes of the 
house with a bloody hand. 

Let it be remembered, despite Carlyle's 
random arrow at " simple people blown 
into flame and fury by theological and 
seignorial bellows," that the nobles and 
the clergy, whatever may have been their 
desire, were too well informed to pit a 
forlorn corner of France against the 
united realm. Here, as in Paris, and for 
rival arguments exactly as apposite, the 
Revolution was a matter belonging to 
" the man on the street." Against what 
they knew to be the spirit of rapine and 
injustice, the people, of themselves, arose. 



23 

Their campaign had no intrigue, no push- 
ing ; it had absolute purity of intention. 
More perfectly than even the American 
civil war, this of La Vendee was fought 
on a moral principle, and on that solely, 
from the start. Every advantage possible 
was on the side of submission ; the peas- 
ants would have been let alone and for- 
gotten, presently had they been weaker, 
and wiser. Unable to foresee the majes- 
tic trend of events, not having in their 
own sore memories the germ of a verdict 
which was to reverse the world, they hit 
out, in the dark, against the local and the 
immediate wrong. Ignorant as they 
were, they were not ignorant of their 
jeopardized liberties. They opposed in- 
iquitous laws for the sake of their own 
commune ; their argument had premises 
impregnably sound. If they were mad, 
it must be added that they were right, 
too, in the fullest relative senses of earth 
and heaven. The titled gentry were 



24 

compelled to join, in nearly every case, 
by their vehemence. D'Elbee, Bon- 
champ, Lescure, La Rochejaquelein, 
Charette, and many of the minor officers, 
were drawn from their very firesides, and 
urged into service. '' You are no braver 
than we, but you know better how to 
manage," so the frank fellows explained 
it to the lords. The priests, also, banished 
from their sad parishes for refusing the 
irregular oaths proposed by the Assem- 
bly, and cast adrift like the hill-side friars 
of Ireland, long held aloof from sanction- 
ing the redress of arms. Nowhere, at 
any time, did they march nor combat 
with their flocks. When their bodies 
were found upon the field, it was man- 
ifest that they had been shot while min- 
istering to the dying. Such, on this point, 
was the Vendean sensitiveness, and aus- 
tere regard for the proprieties, that a 
young subdeacon discovered in the ranks 
was angrily and summarily dismissed. 



Not until the army was at Dol did the 
pastors ever attempt to " fanaticize " the 
soldiery by working upon their religious 
feeling as a means of reviving courage. 
Nor did the laymen ever waive towards 
them that which,in Turreau's phrase, was 
their "blind and incurable attachment." 
At a sign from some active Levite they 
actually disbanded during Holy Week 
of 1793. The Republican squadron, sent 
to quell the revolt, found the villages in 
dead quiet, and so returned north ; but 
on Easter Monday the roads were alive 
again. 

Well was the Bocage called, by the 
earliest of its very few English critics, 
" the last land of romance in Europe." 
The quarrel espoused for conscience' 
sake had a child-like disinterestedness. 
What the men endured we know ; the 
rewards they meant to ask for their suc- 
cess were these : that religion should be 
established, free of state interference; 



that the Bocage itself should be known 
as La Vendee, with a distinct adminis- 
tration ; that the King should make it a 
visit, and retain a corps of Vendeans in 
his guard ; and that the white flag should 
float forever from every steeple, in mem- 
ory of the war ! It is clear that they 
had little to wish for, and that they 
had no greed. Nor did they fight for 
glory, the dearest motive of their race. 
"There is no glory in civil war," said 
Bonchamp, in what was, for once, too 
ascetic a generality. But they were ded- 
icated souls ; they bore themselves gen- 
tly, gayly, without boast or spite ; and 
they long continued to honor the ob- 
ligations laid on them by the purest 
cause that ever drew sword. Their 
blows were struck for the independ- 
ence of their religion, and only inci- 
dentally for the monarchy then identi- 
fied with it. From the chivalrous con- 
versation between the Marquis of Les- 



27 

cure and General Quetineau, then his 
prisoner, we learn that even Lescure 
would have rushed to the common de- 
fence had the Austrian made good his 
threat to pollute the soil of France. 
They failed, we say ; yet what they fought 
for they secured : the liberty of the 
Church, and the restoration (temporary, 
as things are in France) of the govern- 
ment of their allegiance. Louis XVIII. 
was unworthy of their devotion. He 
was mean enough afterwards to reduce 
the pension granted by Napoleon him- 
self to Madame de Bonchamp ; to sus- 
pect the immeasurable loyalty of Ma- 
dame de Lescure ; to refuse admission 
to the portraits of Stofflet and Catheli- 
neau when opening his gallery of gen- 
erals at Saint Cloud, because, forsooth, 
they were but plebeians. In a hundred 
ways, by delayed recognitions, by tempo- 
rizing, by denials, and by cringing to alien 
opinion (things deprecated with energy 



28 

by the Abbe Deniau in his valuable 
work), he broke the faith of a too faith- 
ful party. Yet the praise the western 
subjects hoped for from the little Dau- 
phin of 1793 they v/on from this man. 
"I owe my crown to the Vendeans," he 
said, with the family characteristic of 
gracious speech. 

The peasants, therefore, driven to the 
wall, rebelled without forethought or 
plan ; a desperate handful against the 
strength of new France. At remote 
points, with no concert whatever, hostil- 
ities began : on Sunday, March tenth, in 
Anjou, two days later in Lower Poitou ; 
and months passed ere one knot of in- 
surrectionists heard tidings of the other. 
With the populace at Maulevrier rose 
Stofiflet, the swarthy game-keeper of the 
resident lord ; Stofflet of the German ac- 
cent, harsh and hard, big-nosed, unlet- 
tered, trusty, a keenly intelligent and 
masterful disciplinarian. But the note- 



29 

worthiest leader was Jacques Cathe- 
lineau, "a painstaking, neighborly man," 
wagoner, and vender of woollens. 
There had been a disturbance at Saint 
Florent over the drafting ; the Gov- 
ernment troops fired ; the young re- 
cruits charged on their assailants and 
routed them, pillaging the municipality 
and burning the papers. Cathelineau of 
Pin - en - Mauges was kneading bread 
when he heard of it. " We must begin 
the war," he murmured. His startled 
wife echoed his words, wailing : " Begin 
what war? Who will help you begin 
the war ?" " God," he answered quiet- 
ly. Putting her aside, he wiped his 
arms, drew on his coat, and went out 
instantly to the market-place. That af- 
ternoon he attacked two Republican de- 
tachments and seized their ammunition, 
his small force augmenting on the 
march ; in a few days it was one thou- 
sand strong, and carried ChoUet. Cath- 



3° 

elineau's three brothers enlisted under 
his banner ; in one short year all four 
were to be gathered into their stainless 
graves. He was called " the saint of 
Anjou," and he deserved it ; a man of 
truth, discretion, dignity, and sweetness, 
about whom the wounded crept to die. 




HOSE born in the purple 
had all the "tenderness with 
great spirit " of Plato's elect 
race. They had the deli- 
cacy and high-mindedness 
of the primitive gentleman. A pleasant 
instance of the odd and fine retention of 
amenities in the cannon's mouth, occur- 
red before Nantes, where Stoffiet, explo- 
sive as usual, found occasion to challenge 
Bonchamp. " No, sir," said Bonchamp, 
"God and the King only have the dis- 
posal of my life, and our cause would 
suffer too greviously were it to be de- 
prived of yours." Friendships throve 
among them. Lescure, La Rochejaque- 
lein, and Beauvolliers were closely at- 
tached to one another, as were Marigny 



and Perault, Preferments went wholly 
by natural nerve, intelligence, and a vote 
of deserts. There was no scheme of pro- 
motion to benefit those of gentle blood ; 
the army, formed of a sudden, formed 
into a genuine democracy. " They never 
talked ' equality ' in La Vendee." But its 
first generalissimo, acclaimed with uni- 
versal homage and good-will, was the 
peasant Cathelineau. No long-descend- 
ed knight floated his own banner ; as the 
Prince of Talmont had to be reminded 
at Fougeres, th.Qjieiir-de-lys was sufficient 
for them all. Perfect confidence reigned. 
After the retaking of Chatillon, the 
young Duperat, in company with three 
others, mischievously broke open the 
strong-box in Westermann's carriage ; 
there was presumptive evidence enough 
that they had taken money from it. A 
council ensued, and Duperat, questioned 
by Lescure, denied that they had done 
so. His high character was known, and 



33 

though the mystery was not cleared up, 
the proceedings were closed with an 
apology. Here, at Chatillon, pierced 
with twelve sabres, fell Beaurepaire, who 
had joined the " brigands " at eighteen. 
The Chevalier of Mondyon was a pretty 
lad of fourteen, a truant from his school. 
At the battle of Chantonnay the little 
fellow was placed next to a tall lieuten- 
ant, who, under the pretext of a wound, 
wished to withdraw. " I do not see that 
you are hurt, sir," said the child ; "and, 
as your departure would discourage the 
men, I will shoot you through the head 
if you stir." And as he was quite capa- 
ble of that Roman justice, the tall lieu- 
tenant stayed. De Langerie, two years 
Mondyon's junior, had his pony killed 
under him in his first onset. Put at a 
safe and remote post, but without orders, 
he reappeared, during the hour, galloping 
back on a fresh horse to fight for the 
King. Duchaffault, at eleven, sent back 

3 



to his mother, rode into the ranks again 
at Lugon, to die. Such were the boys of 
La Vendee. 

The Chevaher Frangois-Athenase de 
Charette was first to lead the rebels in 
the wild marsh-lands of Lower Poitou. 
He had been a ship's lieutenant. De- 
spite the known laxity of his private 
conduct, Charette was a power. In 
matters of sense and courage he was 
equal to the best of his extraordinary 
colleagues, all of whom he was destined 
to outlive. He was twenty-eight years 
old when he took command at Mache- 
could. Charles-Melchior Artus, Marquis 
of Bonchamp, was enrolled at the sol- 
emn inauguration of the war. He had 
seen service in India, and was in his 
early prime : a scholar, an accomplished 
tactician, and a man greatly beloved, 
whose name is yet in benediction. La 
Ville-Bauge, placed by force among the 
Blues (so called from the color of their 



coats, which under the kings had been 
white), abandoned them, and joined the 
insurgents at Thouars. He was a youth 
of marked steadiness and patience, dear 
to Lescure and to Henri. Gigot d'Elbee, 
late of the Dauphin cavalry, was forty 
years of age, already white-haired, of 
small and compact build. Possessed of 
many virtues, he was not a striking nor 
engaging character; his conceit, fortu- 
nately,harmed neither himself nor others. 
It was he who read sermons to his men, 
who carried with him the images of his 
patron saints, and who, above all, talked 
so much and so well of the wisdom 
which directs us, that the roguish, con- 
gregation in camp fastened on him the 
nickname of " La Provide7ice." For Les- 
cure, as for Cathelineau, the peasants 
had a veneration. Unselfish, contained 
and cool, versed admirably in military 
science, Lescure at twenty-six was a 
bookish recluse, with a heart all kind- 



36 

ness, and a bearing somewhat lofty and 
austere. Born in 1766, in 1791 he had 
married his first cousin, Victoire, daugh- 
ter of the fine mettlesome old Marquis 
of Donnissan. To this timid girl, who 
heroically followed her husband through 
the Vendean crisis (and who herself, 
years after, was to play a second illus- 
trious role as the wife of Louis de La 
Rochejaquelein), we are beholden for 
the Memoires, naive and precious, which 
supply nearly every main detail of the 
long struggle, which persuaded out of 
life the ignorance and prejudice of its 
traducers, and which serve as the worth- 
iest monument ever raised to the loving 
army, Catholic and Royal. 




N their curious dialect, the 
Vendeans had a verb, sega- 
iller, s'eparpiller, and they 
lived up to it. It meant 
scattering and sharp-shoot- 
ing, every man for himself, in what we 
Americans might call the historic Lex- 
ington style. Each carried his car- 
tridges in his pocket. If any com- 
plained of lack of powder, Henri had 
a pricking answer : " Well, my children, 
the Blues have plenty of it!" which 
reversed matters in five minutes. Bred 
in a htmting country, the King's men 
were expert shots from boyhood. Farm- 
ing weapons fixed on handles adorned 
the marching no-pay volunteers. Such 
guns as they had were put into the ablest 



hands ; and wonderful musketeers they 
made, these hunters of Loroux and the 
Bocage. They crept behind walls and 
hedges, not firing, as did the troops of 
the line, at the height of a man, but aim- 
ing individually, and rarely missing, so 
that throughout an action their loss was 
but as one to five ; they leaped garden 
terraces, and peered from the angles of 
strange little foot-paths, making sudden 
volleys and attacks, the chief usually 
foremost, the men eager and undrilled ; 
or they ran forward by scores, fronting 
the hostile cannon, flinging themselves 
down at every explosion, and so creeping 
nearer and nearer, until they might grap- 
ple with the stupefied cannoneers hand to 
hand. This was their favorite strategy. 
More than one town was actually taken 
by savage wrestling and boxing, without 
a report of fire-arms at all. They lacked 
wagons, reserves, luggage ; each carried 
his own rations. They travelled without 



39 

a calendar, for that sanctioned by the 
Republic, and therefore, with Fabred'Eg- 
lantine's pretty fooleries of Flordal and 
Pluviose, cashiered, was the only one 
extant in France. 

They had thirty lively drums and no 
trumpets ; when they wanted an inspir- 
ing noise they sang a hymn. Sentinels 
could not be trained ; it seems incred- 
ible that they should have done for two 
years without pickets or patrols, except 
when the officers took turns at a nec- 
essary duty. But in this, as in other 
matters, the strong-minded rustics, who 
freely entered the ranks, reasoned, ob- 
jected, fought shy, and were at once the 
solace and the despair of their com- 
manders. A certain fatal independence 
was born in their blood. What chance, 
at any time and however valiant, has 
the army of momentary concurrence 
against the army of sworn obedience } 
Innocent of discipline, they were all but 



impossible to direct on an open plain. 
Every movement was a farce in tactics. 
A chief exercised his full authority ac- 
cording to the individual esteem in 
which he was held. This singular code, 
likely to be subversive of all authority 
elsewhere, was the only one which proud 
and willing Vendee could be brought to 
understand. " Such a general goes such 
a way," the adjutant would call; "who 
goes with him ?" And the tenants of 
his own seigneury, the guerilla vassals, 
would run with a shout after him, form- 
ing their lines by some convenient object 
— a house or a tree. Their Monsieur 
Henri had a formula borrowed uncon- 
sciously from the old war-cry of Gas- 
ton de Foix : " He who loves me follows 
me !" When he flashed down the front 
on his wonderful white horse, which 
the cheering peasants had christened 
the Fallowdeer, thinking nothing else 
could be so wild, so delicate, so amaz- 



ingly swift, parish after parish raUied to 
him in a little cloud. The fashion of 
gathering in clans and bands, primitive 
as it was, had its advantages. Every- 
one stood, in action, next another of his 
own estate or blood; and La Vendee 
was notoriously careful of its wounded 
and slain. Never were men more de- 
pendent on the nerve and sagacity of 
their leaders. A disabled officer dared 
not budge, or the crazy columns would 
give way. Lescure, unhorsed at Sau- 
mur, would have kept the troops igno- 
rant of his hurt had not the boy Beauvol- 
liers thrown himself upon him with a 
loud cry of lamentation and started a 
panic in the ranks. Charette being 
wounded long after at Dufour, his regi- 
ments dispersed like sheep. When Cath- 
elineau of the shining brow fell in sight 
of his army, there was instant rout. At 
the recapture of Chatillon many a dis- 
sembler, sick and weak, rode forth in 



affected vigor, and so forced the splendid 
issue of the day. 

The cavalry bestrode steeds of divers 
eccentricities, but at the tails of one and 
all figured the enemy's derided tri-color 
cockade. Ropes were stirrups to these 
gallant paladins, and their sabres hung 
by packthreads. They had small lei- 
sure for the conventions of the toilet: 
their hair and beards looked like Or- 
son's. The officers wore woollen blouses 
and gaiters, having, like the others, the 
little red consecrated heart sewed on 
their coats ; they lacked at first any dis- 
tinguishing dress. Neither they nor the 
privates received a sou for services ; if a 
man were in want he asked for a dis- 
bursement, and, until supplies failed, he 
got it. Funds flowed into the general 
reservoir from the pockets of the gentry, 
and from a source as obvious — the rights 
of confiscation. The main army aver- 
aged twenty thousand men ; at a pinch 



it could be doubled. Sobriety reigned 
in the camps, though it was the one 
considerable virtue to which the good 
peasants, un- French in most matters, 
were not blindly addicted. Consider- 
ing the prohibition against the presence 
of women, it is surprising to find here and 
there undetected in the van some spot- 
less amazon like Jeanne Robin, or the re- 
vered Renee Bordereau, or Dame de La 
Rochefoucauld, a cavalry captain, shot 
upon the Breton coast. Piety was uni- 
versal. The scythe - bearing soldiery, 
meeting a wayside cross half-way to the 
battery, would doff hats and kneel an in- 
stant, then charge like fiends on the foe. 
The parishes sent carts to the road-side, 
laden with provisions for the passing 
cohorts. The women, children, and old 
men knelt in the cornfields, while the 
din went on afar off, to beseech the Lord 
of Hosts. At Laval and Chollet, where 
the sieges closed perforce in one mad 



scrimmage in the dark, the Vendeans 
fired wherever they heard an oath, surer 
than ever the Cromwelhans were before 
them, that in that direction they could 
bag none but legitimate game. 

The peasants were so many big chil- 
dren ; they had no adult comprehension 
of their momentous concerns, to which 
they gave themselves by spurts, with 
perfect disinterestedness, ardor, and zeal. 
After the first hint that the victory was 
theirs, they hastened to ring the church- 
bells, and make bonfires of the papers of 
the administration — proceedings which, 
according to Madame de Lescure, af- 
forded them unfailing amusement. They 
went into action like a black whirlwind, 
with roundelays or litanies on their lips, 
and the continuous battle-cry: "The 
King for us, all the same !" They frol- 
icked about the famous twelve-pounder 
they had named Marie -Jeanne ; they 
kissed its ornate brazen rim ; they buried 



45 

its inscriptions of Richelieu's era in 
flowers and ribbons ; they lost it with 
mopings, and they recaptured it with 
salvos of joy. "Above all things, boys, 
we must get Marie-Jeanne back !" cried 
La Rochejaquelein on a certain occasion. 
" The best runner among you, that's 
the man for her !" There was no reason 
whatever for such special devotion : it 
was pure fun on all sides. They were 
never under arms for more than a few 
consecutive days. The gathering to- 
gether was a sensational sight. The 
church -bells clanged for a signal, the 
windmills gesticulated, horns were blown 
on the hills; and proprietor, farmer, 
peasant, with sticks and hunting -guns, 
came threading the hedges, and running 
in many a long dark line through the 
waving crops into the village market- 
place. The troops were repeatedly dis- 
persing and rallying, giving their chiefs 
endless worry and chagrin. They fought, 



46 

like Spenser's angels, " all for love, and 
nothing for reward." But they left the 
ranks when they chose ; after a success, 
rather than after a defeat, they would 
scatter to their homes like so much this- 
tle-down in the air, and it was hopeless 
to try to follow up an advantage gained. 
It was when difficulties were suspended 
that, in the wisdom of their villageous 
heads, they hurried off, one to his wife, 
and one to his farm, and one to his mer- 
chandise. No general was baffled and 
angered oftener by this freak than Henri. 
The valor of the Vendeans was incompar- 
able, though one might borrow a musical 
metaphor and add that it swerved too 
easily from pitch. And it is noteworthy, 
as by a paradox, that whenever they 
wavered it was not, at least, through 
dread of any personal hardship. They 
were often ragged and hungry, but they 
did not play truant for that. They soon 
underwent horrible poverty and distress. 



47 

and lacked food and clothes. The 
picked men of a company long marched 
in grotesque dominos out of sacked 
playhouses, in lawyers' gowns, even in 
furniture-stuffs and draperies. The chiv- 
alric De Verteuil was found dead on the 
field equipped in two petticoats, one 
about his neck, the other about his 
waist: as noble armor, perhaps, as offi- 
cer ever wore. Frequently, when ammu- 
nition was in abundance, the unaccount- 
able army was overcome ; and as often, 
without a carabine among six, it swept 
everything before it. Napoleon was the 
first to see — all the world sees now — 
how little was wanted to secure their 
ultimate triumph ; how drill, a few kegs 
of powder, a few observant, able, cool 
heads where the exiles were congregat- 
ed, and the prestige and authority of 
some royal name, might have built up 
again, it may be in justice, the ancient 
fabric surely in justice pulled down. 



48 

They had no fair play. "Yet these 
same men, by bravery and enthusiasm, 
and by knowledge developed of short 
experience, conquered a part of France, 
obtained an honorable peace, and de- 
fended their cause with more glory and 
success than did the leagued allies." 

As we get away from the grim ethics 
of history the aesthetics of it take shape 
and color, and give us an abstract pleas- 
ure from the centres of thought and 
pain. There is an unspeakable attract- 
iveness, despite all, in the image of these 
turbulent years — an almost Arabian be- 
guilement, as of something which never 
need be true. The course of events is 
like a romantic drama, full of " points," 
of poses, of electric surprises ; the dia- 
logue flows in alexandrines ; the crises 
are settled in the nick of time. The 
talk is the rhetoric of hearts sincere, but 
French. The devoted Marquis of Don- 
nissan breaks in upon two duelling 



49 

swords : " ' What ! the Lord Christ par- 
dons his executioners, and a soldier of 
the Christian army tries to slay his com- 
rade ?' At these words they drop their 
swords and embrace each other !" Or, 
after the terrible battle of Mans, and not 
long before her little daughter's birth, 
Madame de Lescure, hemmed in the 
choked streets of the city, catches in de- 
spair at the hand of a gentle-faced young 
trooper pushing by : " Sir, have pity on 
a poor woman who cannot go on. Help 
me !" Whereupon the young trooper 
weeps some feverish tears : " What can 
I do ? I am a woman also !" Or that 
charming impostor, the pseudo-bishop of 
Agra, stands up before the serried lines, 
and sheds upon them such prose as 
Matthew Arnold should praise forever : 
''Race antique etfidele des serviteursde 7ios 
rozSypz'eux zelateiirs du trone et de Vautel, 
etifants de la Ve?tdee, marckez, cojnbattez, 
triomphez! C'estDieu qui vous Vordonne." 




HE sportsman Count of La 
Rochejaquelein had it all 
his own way at the Aubiers. 
He took the town, and 
captured large supplies, and 
gleefully perched upon the cemetery wall, 
fired no less than two hundred telling 
shots. Thence he rode by night to Bon- 
champ and D'Elbee, and to the weary 
allies of Anjou, bringing aid and arms ; 
and, as a gift not least, the contagious 
cheer that was in him. When he had 
fulfilled his public duty, but not before 
that, he flew to the rescue of his friends. 
Scarcely had Henri left Clisson, in the 
spring, when Lescure and all his family 
were seized as suspects, and conducted 
to Bressuire, but forgotten there when 



fear caused an evacuation of the borough. 
Henri himself easily carried it, and burst 
in upon them at the chateau, crying that 
he had freed them. By a comical incon 
sistency, great numbers of the Republican 
inhabitants rushed for protection back 
to Clisson, as soon as Citizen Lescure, 
walking a free man from Bressuire, had 
entered the gates. That godly gentle- 
man made bashful Henri kiss every 
woman among them, to ease their fears 
of the "monster" whom they believed 
him to be. 

Six victories, due to Henri's restless 
energy, followed in swift succession. 
Though his growth, in all things, was 
steadily towards reasonableness and the 
golden mean, his chief early character- 
istic was hare-brained intrepidity; a 
habit of confronting too near, pursuing 
too far, " combating with giants," as old 
Burton says of his warrior, " running 
first upon a breach, and, as another 



52 

Phillipus, riding into the thickest of his 
enemies." He was wholly without fear, 
and often, at first, without foresight ; and 
it took many bitter denials and reverses 
to teach him the pardonableness of de- 
liberation and second thought in others. 
But while he lived, wherever he went, he 
was a force. He was of the stuff of Ho- 
mer's joyous men. His decisive fashion 
swayed elder and better soldiers. His 
troops were his for risks such as no gen- 
eral else besought them to run ; every 
day he won their hearts anew by some 
spurt of daring, some astonishing fooling 
with death or failure. Many a dragoon 
was cut down with his sabre ; horses 
were slain under him again and again. 
It is said of him that he never took a 
prisoner without offering him a single 
fight, sword to sword. This laughing 
audacity of his had no cant in it. It was 
the metal of which he was made, that 
which he lived by, the blameless outcome 



53 

of himself : a thing to sadden and exas- 
perate his companions, and fill them 
with foreboding. Pilgrim-shells are 
quartered upon the arms of his house, 
"the scallop-shells of quiet," as the poet 
sings. A more sarcastic advice for the 
La Rochejaqueleins it would be impos- 
sible to conceive ! 

As the close study of the Vendeans 
brings to mind the character of the 
Scotch Highlanders, great at an onset, 
with not a whit more native knowledge 
of the common etiquette of war, so Hen- 
ri himself, in sober simplicity of nature, 
in the firm thoroughness of all he had to 
do, even in the agreeable accident of 
personal beauty, is not unlike a much- 
maligned man who lived a century be- 
fore him : John Graham of Claverhouse, 
the never-to-be-forgotten " deil o' Dun- 
dee." Claverhouse had a habit of curl- 
ing his hair on papers ; and one learns, 
with the same sensation, that Henri had 



54 

one of those singular antipathies no ef- 
fort of will can correct. At Pontorson, 
while Madame de Lescure was sewing in a 
room, with a tame black-and-gray squirrel 
in her lap, he came in, and backed against 
the door, pale and trembling. The sight 
of a squirrel, as he said with a laugh, gave 
him a feeling of invincible terror ! His 
friend asked him to stroke the little 
creature. He did so, shaking in every 
limb, and avowing his weakness with 
great good-humor. He was never much 
of a talker. Discussions were intolerable 
to him. If called upon in council, he 
would speak his mind briefly, overcom- 
ing an extreme diffidence ; and having 
done, he withdrew, or worse, fell asleep. 
No one was more humane at battle's 
end ; but, nevertheless, Henri's element 
was battle. His Paradise was like the 
heathen board, where, after the combat 
and the chase, he might sit at the " red 
right hand of Odin ;" and the masterly 



rider looked forward to a life where he 
might play soldier forever. " When the 
King " (Louis XVII.) " is on the throne," 
he confided to his cousin Lescure, " I 
shall ask for a regiment of hussars, a 
regiment always on the gallop." It was 
his whole desire of guerdon. 

Lescure had also the Roman devoted- 
ness : any morning he stood ready to 
outdo Curtius and Horatius. In the 
rout of Moulin-aux-Chevres he drew the 
hostile squadrons from the pursuit of the 
frantic Vendeans by calling their atten- 
tion to himself and to La Rochejaquelein 
by name. At Thouars he gained the 
bridge of Vrine alone, amid a shower 
of balls. He returned to his dispirited 
band with exhortations ; one emboldened 
comrade followed him to the second 
charge. But on the instant Henri ar- 
rived with Forestier, to join Lescure and 
fire the lagging troops, as the celestial 
armies are fabled to have fought at need 



56 

for the old commonwealths. Here, this 
same day, mounted on the shoulders of 
a gigantic peasant named Texier, one of 
the most useful men in the ranks, Henri 
broke the mouldy coping of the fortress 
wall, and through the breach hurled 
stones at the flying Blues. His course 
henceforward is to be tracked in these 
flashing incidents, deeds compacted of 
demonic sense and wit. Pauvert de- 
picts him breaking the tri-color lines 
outside Argenton merely by whistling 
through, with two friends in his train, 
like a blast of wind. At Chateau-Gontier 
he seized and bore the colors ; there and 
elsewhere, wherever he moved, bullets 
ploughed the ground under him, and sent 
up a puff of dust to his spurs. While 
his weary infantry slept, he was known 
to watch for them, in an exposed biv- 
ouac, and turn his idleness to account 
by picking cartridges for his poorer 
" children " out of the wealthy pockets 



57 

of the adjacent slain. He and Stofflet 
reconnoitred the streets of hostile Cha- 
tillon by night, on all fours, the sentinel 
refraining from challenging the passage 
of the big dogs they were supposed to 
be. Observe the tricks of a generalis- 
simo, on whose safety the balance of 
empire hung ! He was a lad ; he did not 
know his value ; but what he did know 
was that nobody could manage these 
indispensable lesser manoeuvres so ex- 
quisitely as himself. " Quel gaz'llard f" 
shouted those who at first held back 
from this incorrigible, superculpable, 
adorable, business-like creature of a 
Henri ; " qtcel gazllardf" At the siege 
of Saumur, at a wavering moment of the 
assault, he flung his hat into the in- 
trenchments. " Who will fetch that for 
me.^" he cried, as certain of his response 
as was the great Conde, or Essex before 
Cadiz in 1596. Of course, with his usual 
verve, he leaped towards it himself, and 



the crowd rushed after him as one. In 
the same engagement he saved the Hfe 
of his loyal Ville-Bauge, struck from his 
stirrups while loading Henri's pieces for 
him ; as at Antrain, during the twenty- 
two hours' battle, and with a call for 
much greater adroitness, he saved that 
of La Roche Saint Andre. 

The central event of this period was 
the five days' victory at Saumur. By 
Cathelineau's order a Te Deu7n was sung 
in the church, the captured flags, rent 
with balls and black with smoke and 
blood, dipping to the chancel floor at 
every sound of the Holy Name. Such 
a spectacle put them all in an exalted 
mood. Henri was found at a window, 
meekly musing over their fortunes : he, 
the deliverer, who placed elsewhere the 
primal credit of the deliverance. The 
garrison here was left to his charge, 
much to his disrelish. "They make a 
veteran of me !" he said, ruefully, for the 



59 

affairs he loved were going on outside. 
The inaction of the time told on his 
men, quite as discerning as himself, and 
far less dutiful ; despite the fifteen sous 
a day which, as the first Vendean bribe, 
were offered them to remain, they per- 
ceived that there was nothing more to 
fear, and slipped away to their homes. 
Soon but nine were left, and with them 
Henri departed gloomily, carrying his 
cannon, and at Thouars, since not a 
cannoneer came back to relieve him, 
burying it in the river. Lugon, too, was 
lost. Having got astray during the ac- 
tion, he arrived but in time to cover the 
retreat. At Martigne, where D'Elbee 
was in command, and again at Vihiers, 
while Henri was off recruiting, his name 
had to be cited constantly to encourage 
the soldiers, though he was absent from 
the field. 

He stood in a valley path, giving or- 
ders, during an obstinate fight at Mar- 



6o 

tigne - Briand. A ball struck his right 
hand, shattering the thumb and glanc- 
ing to the elbow. He did not stir, nor 
even drop his pistol. " See if my elbow 
bleeds much," he said to his companion. 
" No, M'sieu Henri." " Then it is only 
a broken thumb," he replied, and went 
on directing the troops. It proved to be 
an ugly and dangerous wound ; it de- 
prived him, during the month of Sep- 
tember, of his share of three signal vic- 
tories won by " the devils in sabots " 
under Bonchamp at Torfou, Montaigu, 
and Saint Fulgent. Not long after, be- 
fore Laval, his arm limp and swollen in 
a sling, Henri was attacked on a lonely 
road by a powerful foot -soldier. He 
seized the fellow by the collar with his 
left hand, and so managed his horse with 
his legs that his struggling assailant was 
unable to draw upon him. A dozen 
Vendeans ran up, eager to kill the man 
who menaced their general. He forbade 



it, as he was sure to do. But he check- 
mated his Goliath with his tongue. " Go 
back to the RepubHcans," he told him; 
" say that you were alone with the chief 
of the brigands, who had but one arm to 
use and no weapons, and that you could 
not get the better of him." 

In addition to his dark blue great-coat 
and his wide hat, Henri wore anything 
which he found available, and chose, for 
his distinctive mark, red handkerchiefs 
of immemorial Chollet make about his 
head and neck, and another about his 
waist to hold his pistols. It is striking 
to find him, the soul of conservatism, in 
the identical dress of the Cordeliers, 
"the red brothers of Danton," cravatted 
and girdled in their Paris fashion, and 
flaunting the bonnet rouge. The appro- 
priation of the hated color must have 
been of malice prepense, as a bit of not 
illegal bravado, and a slap of exquisite 
fun at the tailorish pomp and circum- 



62 

stance of war. Henri made a mountain 
guy of himself to some purpose. Among 
the Blues at Fontenay it quickly became 
a universal order to fire at the Red Hand- 
kerchief. The other leaders were un- 
able to persuade him to doff it. " They 
know me by that," was his aggravating 
answer, "and besides, it is so comfort- 
able!" But they adorned themselves 
quickly with the same insignia, and saved 
him from the sharp-shooters. Such was 
the origin of the officers' earliest uni- 
form ; and with their flapping boots, 
their huge swords, and these floating 
flame-colored gingham plaids, they must 
indeed have resembled the " brigands " 
of their enemies' fancy. Henri con- 
tinued to take pride in his Chollet tur- 
ban, and was apt to consider a hat, ex- 
cept on festal occasions, as a piece of 
tautology. Later, after the conference 
at Fougeres, he adopted the white sash, 
with its famous little black knot. 



f 




HOSE officers and civic ad- 
herents who encompassed 
the royal family at Paris, 
between the tragic forsak- 
ing of Versailles and the 
dawn of the regicide year, were, as well 
they knew, standing under oak-boughs 
in a gathering storm. Event was tread- 
ing on the heels of event; every hour 
was oracular ; it was impossible not to 
forecast the morrow, and to dread or defy 
it, as habit might prompt. Through the 
charged and purple air strange figures 
were passing : Mirabeau, borne dead to 
the Pantheon, to be eldest of its sleep- 
ers ; Lafayette, with brave step and smile 
of compromise, riding through the blue 
national guards; the Queen, appearing 
in white on balconies, calm before mobs, 



X 



64 

with her firm 'fair arm about her httle 
son ; Barbaroux and Roland escorting 
Madame as she goes reluctantly from 
her happy dream-time in the garret of 
the dingy Rue Saint Jacques into place 
and authority; Camille Desmoulins, ever 
sauntering loose-haired, with a soiled roll 
of writing, and a sarcasm not unsweet 
upon his tongue ; the Cheniers ; Vergni- 
aud ; Westermann, with his hard, tena- 
cious intelligence not yet amply employ- 
ed ; and Robespierre, " the last word of 
the Revolution, which, thus early, no man 
could read ;" regal maskers, flown to the 
frontiers and snared at Varennes, and 
marched back to the capital amid din of 
sabres ; couriers arriving with verifica- 
tions of the butcheries at Avignon, and 
bishops departing, after a rapturous Te 
Deu7n in the cathedral, each to his seeth- 
ing diocese ; stout foreigners drinking in 
the Faubourg Saint Honore, and darkly 
prognosticating ruin for this whole wild 



65 

smithy where so much old iron was being 
lighted and beaten into new uses ; Mail- 
lard and his murder-men of the Abbaye, 
walking yet peaceably, but looming on 
the horizon like huge dripping spectres 
of the worst that was to be ; — such was 
the panorama, such the France, all of 
which Henri de La Rochejaquelein liter- 
ally saw, and part of which, belying the 
adage, he was not. He, too, had been at 
the Cafe Valois ; he, too, had watched on 
the quays the gaming soldiers his col- 
leagues, and the knowing tri-color de- 
moiselles ; and heard through his lonely 
windows, by night, the mounting chorus 

of 

"Amour sacre de la patrie, 
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs /" 

the legacy of immortal song which a 
Royalist had given to the Republic for- 
ever. But these externals had no real 
hold upon him. He was no searcher of 
the deep roots nor the forward-stretch- 



ing tendrils of circumstance. He went 
across the lesser Doomsday as a child 
across the hostile streets of a city, 
thinking always, but not of the obvious 
things. What he saw through the medi- 
um of his sequestered soul were reeking 
sedition, experiments blundering and 
caring not whom they hurt, principles 
despoiling the world of quiet and gentle- 
ness and "the unbought grace of life;" 
and he moved, indeed, towards Burke's 
own curious inference, that the Revolu- 
tion was criminal because it was unman- 
nerly. He took no time to philosophize 
when the one blameless and disadvan- 
taged Bourbon needed his sword ; it was 
nothing to him that pent - up rights, 
burst abroad, were about to vindicate 
themselves terribly and justly in " immo- 
lating a generation to make way for an 
idea," while he saw, far more clearly, his 
order injured, his religion handicapped, 
and the old ideals taught him at his 



67 

mother's knee swept into the universal 
dust -heap. There were hundreds of 
honorable lives lil^e his, impelled by the 
same hurrying conscientiousness, form- 
ing on either side of the great struggle 
from 1789 to 1792: the men who repre- 
sented the early beauty of the Revolu- 
tion, while yet it was a " child of many 
prayers." No apology (in the primitive 
nor in the perverted sense of the word) 
need be made for their opposing courses, 
so soon to be defined ; it is enough if we 
wise landsmen of posterity know the 
great current and whither it tends, and 
that we perceive, near shore, the forceful 
counter-current pushing backward vic- 
toriously, if but for an hour, and recog- 
nize that both are one clear water, and 
that the same Hand suffers them to flow. 
Henri went home, not to ponder much, 
but to grieve a little and then to fight : 
to fight the strength of the equinoctial 
tide, even as it proved. 



68 

With every foot of the Bocage he be- 
came acquainted; he travelled it over 
and over ; he was spun like a thread of 
destiny into and around its level fields 
and farms ; he crossed and re-crossed its 
fords ; he lost and won its towns ; he 
held its fortunes for a year in the hollow 
of his hand ; his grave, like his birth, 
was in its bosom. It is small wonder 
that a species of folk-lore, in his own 
neighborhood, has, in three generations, 
grown up around him, which makes it a 
difficult thing to disentangle what is true 
of him from what might as well be true : 
for the French are not given, even in 
their gossip, to incongruities. Every 
rustic, who, having served under Henri, 
lived to startle a more prosaic world 
with his reminiscences, had anecdotes to 
tell of him really vital and precious ; and 
the travellers who were able to gather 
them at first hand, like Monsieur Eugene 
Genoude and Viscount Francis Walsh, 



69 

are yet to be envied. It is known from 
oral report how he would run any risk 
for a charge of his, were he, in particu- 
lar, a child or a coward ; or how he 
would deny himself bread while one 
mouth hungered near him ; how he was 
a fatal apparition, looming bare-headed 
from the saddle, pistol in hand, to those 
who encountered him in a charge : for 
he had a sure aim, and no genteel mis- 
givings as to his present duty. Picked 
out for the object of many raids, he had 
the strength of nerve to save himself 
repeatedly, by blowing out the brains of 
a dozen. When he achieved an admitted 
advantage, he seemed to overflow in- 
stantly with his native kindness and 
compassion. His military career was 
less one of thought and command than 
of manual killing and sparing : and in 
that particular he belonged with the 
ancient world, with Gideon and with 
Hector. The endless patience which he 



brought to bear on his heart-breaking 
circumstance and his ungovernable mass 
of men, out -soars praise. Not once, 
among the contradiction, the disorder, 
the stupidity which he deplored, was he 
anything but just. This autumnal sweet- 
ness of his character, which he seemed 
to have inherited in full at Lescure's 
death, was its first and last distinction. 
It helped him, at an age when moods 
alternate with the pendulum, to take 
prosperity without pride, trials without 
a plaint. Young in every, fibre, he had 
not a trace of the severity of youth, its 
raw dominance, its hasty partial will. 

As he takes the eye from among the 
striking figures in Madame de La Roche- 
jaquelein's Mejiioires, so, alive, he com- 
pelled the interest of on-lookers and of 
commentators who were foes. Jomini, 
in his Histoire Critique, turns to him with 
insistent admiration. Kleber's reports 
are filled with notes on his scientific 



skill. It was the opinion of Sempre, af- 
ter the Vendean repulse at Granville and 
the ensuing movement which almost 
cancelled it, that "Xenophon himself 
was not half so clever as this vagabond." 
And Napoleon, the man whose attribute 
it was to know men, dictating to General 
Montholon at Saint Helena, used a sig- 
nificant exclamation : " What might he 
not have become !" Henri's large close 
mental grasp, his delighting straightfor- 
ward talk, his prompt deed, were all of 
a piece ; and they won his great contem- 
porary from the outset. Nor had the 
latter forgotten, when the crown was 
upon his head, to invent every means to 
gain the coveted adherence of Louis de 
La Rochejaquelein, who was much of the 
same mould. 

Henri, unlike Lescure and Bonchamp, 
was no scholar : one might guess as 
much from his handwriting, always too 
indolent and free. To one book, how- 



ever, he clung, and after carrying it 
about for an interrupted rereading, he 
would put it under his pillow : this was 
a Life of Turenne. His age and his 
country were surfeited with learned and 
poetic persons ; while they were writing 
things worthy to be read, he, as Sir Wal- 
ter Scott would put it, was doing things 
worthy to be written ; he was breathing 
abroad something of the Greece crystal- 
izing silently in Andre Chenier's brain. 
Shall we ascribe it to immunity from the 
giant literature which was the prelude 
of the Revolution that he was a very 
simple youth indeed, that he believed in 
God, and was strict {''severe'' is Madame 
de La Rochejaquelein's word) in matters 
touching his conscience ? " He knew 
me at Saumur, when I came on with 
Cathelineau," a peasant told a stranger, 
" and he spoke to me : ' Hov,^ well it 
goes with us !' ' Yes, yes, so it does,' I 
replied, 'thanks to you, M'sieu Henri !' 



\ 



' Thanks unto God !' was what he said." 
His own success, wonderful in the ex- 
treme to him, he preferred to charge 
upon supernatural agencies. When he 
galloped into the guns, and caught no 
one admiring him visibly, he took occa- 
sion to make the sign of the cross ; the 
bigger the danger, the bigger the gest- 
ure, according to tradition. Nothing 
was mere mechanism with him ; he was 
a scorner of exaggeration. His relig- 
iousness was in the current of his blood. 
It alone kept him to the end an optimist : 
one able to leap into the chasm beyond, 
without ever having had a single specu- 
lation about it, nor a single dread. 



4. 




HE autumn of 1793, when 
the red flag was floating at 
the altar of the Fatherland, 
when the tombs at Saint 
Denis were rifled of their 
kingly dust, and some hearts were yet 
aching for the fallen Gironde, — this 
memorable autumn was marked in the 
west by the choc on the heights about 
Chollet, and the tragedy of the passage 
of the Loire. During the first attack 
D'Elbee and Lescure were borne help- 
less from the field. The ensuing night 
a council of war was held, Stofflet 
and Henri begging for leave to defend 
the town, and Bonchamp persistently 
pleading for an expedition across the 
river, in the hope of obtaining succor 



75 

and new strength from the Bretons, and 
of opening a northern seaport to the ex- 
pected co-operation of England. While 
the debate was yet seething, the second 
clash came, and Bonchamp was struck 
down. It was a terrific battle : forty 
thousand peasants against forty -five 
thousand tried and trained soldiers of 
the line. " They fought like tigers," 
brave Kleber wrote to the Convention, 
'•' but our lions beat them." Before day- 
break on the seventeenth of October, 
without any order of advance, and 
against the impassioned efforts of Henri 
and other generals, panic set in, and the 
air was rent with a league of cries. Then 
began the mad rush for the Loire, and an 
exodus comparable to nothing human 
but that of the Tartar tribes. The man- 
oeuvre, suggested but a little while before 
as a safeguard, was adopted in complete 
despair, and the retreat deteriorated into 
a migration. Countless families emptied 



76 

themselves into the rebel camp ; a horde 
of poor creatures, including the entire 
population of Chollet and the near bor- 
oughs, flew to the common centre ; 
women, babes, the aged, the sick, the 
fearful, hung darkening over the army, 
like summer insects over a pool. Once 
it had started, nothing could hold back 
the onward pressure of such numbers. 
Four thousand men were detached un- 
der Talmont and sent to clear the banks 
at Saint Florent. A whole people, their 
homes burning behind them, thrown 
upon pauperism, inevitable separation, 
and the rigors of the coming winter, the 
Republican hosts advancing from all 
sides to exterminate them ; Bonchamp, 
on whose persuasion the fatal move was 
undertaken, on whose prudence the oth- 
ers relied, known to be dying ; Lescure, 
who had been wounded at La Trem- 
blaye in the midst of his squadrons, dy- 
ing also ; the bewildered, groaning mul- 



titude dropping, like the pallid passen- 
gers of the Styx, into the river-boats, and 
struggling from island to island; — what 
a spectacle ! The great tears of anger 
and sorrow stood thick in Henri's eyes. 
When a march could be formed, the foot- 
soldiery, with the cannon, were placed 
at the head, and the cavalry and picked 
men brought up the rear. Between 
them were the fifty thousand drags, 
stumbling along in a lunacy of terror, 
and in a muffled roar bewailing their 
bitter fate, and calling on Heaven for 
"mercy. The habit of their enemies was 
invariably to attack the van or the rear : 
— a mistake which, more than anything 
else, prorogued the inevitable end. 

Cathelineau, the first, and, next to 
Charette, the ablest commander-in-chief 
of the Vendeans, having been mortally 
wounded before the gates of Nantes, 
D'Elbee, by his skilful policy at Chatil- 
lon, had himself appointed to the sue- 



78 

cession. It was the work of an obstinate 
cabal ; Bonchamp, by every claim, de- 
served the election. But after the pas- 
sage of the Loire, D'Elbee, in the con- 
fusion, was not to be found. Lescure, 
besought, in his bed, to take matters into 
his own hands, immediately proposed 
that the officer best-beloved by all divi- 
sions of the army, and best-known to 
them,Henri de La Rochejaquelein,should 
be nominated to the vacant generalship. 
"As for me, should I recover," added 
Lescure, " you know I cannot quarrel 
with Henri. I shall be his aide-de-camp." 
The little senate met at Laval. Henri, 
never willing to push himself forward, 
dissented hotly. As advocate against 
his own claims, he made his longest 
speech. He represented that he had 
neither age nor experience, that he was 
merely a fighter, that he had too little 
practical wisdom, that he was untena- 
cious of his opinions, that he should 



79 

never learn how to silence those who 
opposed him : in vain. After the ensu- 
ing vote he was found hidden in a corner, 
and cried like the child he was, on Les- 
cure's breast, for the unsought honor 
thrust upon him. He was to have no 
further guardianship and support from 
that dearest of his friends. On the road 
between Ernee and Fougeres Lescure 
died, not before a mighty pang was add- 
ed to his passing by an oral account of 
the execution of the Queen. In the 
room where his body lay Henri said to 
his widow, " Could my life restore him 
to you, oh, you might take it!" 

The Royalists nearly sank under this 
second calamity, for Bonchamp, too, had 
but lately died, on the eighteenth of Oc- 
tober. (" The news of these two," cried 
lively Barrere in the Convention, " is 
better than any victory !") His remains, 
which, like Lescure's, were carried for a 
brief time under the colors, were tempo- 



rarily buried at Varades. His only son, 
Hermenee, became Henri's special care. 
In all his trouble and preoccupation he 
was pathetically kind to the child, and 
had him sleep with him every night. By 
day Hermenee rode with Henri on the 
same saddle, or trotted in the rear-guard, 
beating his toy-drum, haranguing the sol- 
diers with pretty ardor, and remembering 
each lovingly by name. The poor little 
fellow, weakened by his hardships, suc- 
cumbed to the small-pox, in his mother's 
arms, at Saint Herbelon, before the year 
was over. 

The wretched throng were exiled, as 
completely as they would have been had 
they crossed the Pyrenees. Seven 
months of intense activity, seven months 
of successful fight, even while they were 
surrounded like sheep in a pen, had re- 
sulted only in this : that no single gene- 
ral, at his allotted post, had been able to 
beat back the Revolution from La Ven- 



dee ; that the restoration of the mon- 
archy, the remoter and greater object, 
was more visionary and hypothetical 
than ever. They hurried northward 
feverishly, pursued always by an im- 
mense force, subject to continuous cold 
rains, obliged to leave at every stopping- 
place the wounded and the sick, the 
women and babes, to mark their trail 
and to perish by massacre. Kleber had 
his keen eye upon Henri : " I do not be- 
lieve he can hold out long, away from 
his own country." But Henri proceeded 
to defeat the garrison at Chateau- 
Gontier, to crush L'Echelle's division 
at Entrammes, and to score a double 
triumph at Laval. It was at Chateau- 
Gontier that the venerable Monsieur de 
Royrand, who had sustained the war in 
Lower Poitou from the very beginning, 
breathed his last. His regiments ceased 
firing, and mourned aloud. Henri hur- 
ried into the midst of them, his own 

6 



tears flowing. " Come, come !" he cried ; 
"we will weep and pray for the dear 
friend to-morrow. Let us avenge him 
to-day !" Then he swooped like an eagle 
on the troops of the state, with Roy- 
rand's orphans at his heels. 



f 




HESE were the days of what 
the peasants called "the 
reign of Monsieur Henri." 
Power and the opportunity 
of dictatorship, which prove 
the ruin of much excellence, seemed to 
awaken in him only fresh virtues. So 
sound was his temperament, that the less 
unham^pered he became the more intelli- 
gently he was able to serve his cause ; 
and his manner of serving, as we know, 
was not to draw charts in his tent. In- 
capable of turning his little finger to 
benefit himself, he was a perennial bene- 
fit to all around him. His glad irre- 
pressible gusto leavened the spirits of 
thousands. Providence, he liked to think, 
took care of him while he was needed. 



84 

Now that he had a community depending 
upon him, as if he were a patriarch of old, 
his conduct came to be more and more 
temperate. For his habitual rashness, 
criminal under other conditions, he ought 
not at any time to be blamed. A verse 
from the most masculine ode in English 
literature might be borrowed to describe 
La Rochejaquelein, who, 

"like the three-fork'd lightning first 

Breaking the clouds where it was nurst, 
Did thorough his own side 
His fiery way divide." 

He must have blazed or burst. And he 
had exterior warrant. It was of the first 
importance that the generals should have 
the confidence of their curiously critical 
liegemen ; and that confidence was to 
be won in nowise but by the display of 
pluck, the argument of example. Les- 
cure and Bonchamp, whom none will 
accuse of recklessness, pursued, on cal- 



85 

culation, the same and the only course 
of constant self-exposure ; for to such 
cruel tests did the foolish philosophers 
of La Vendee put their worthiest. Can 
anything be more marvellous than that 
an army so handicapped by whim and 
ignorance should have withstood attack 
at all ? One by one its governors and 
guides were mown like weeds, who, had 
they been enrolled in other ranks, would 
have been warded from the remote 
approach of personal peril. 

The only legitimate stricture on Hen- 
ri's behavior is that he did not compel 
obedience off the field. It became 
necessary even for him, who was so se- 
cure in the affections of his volunteers, 
and who had so much influence over 
them, to shed something besides persua- 
sion on the difficult crowd in his charge. 
He made no endeavor to employ Stoff- 
let's verbal whips and goads, which never 
failed to accomplish their object ; stern- 



86 

ness was not natural to him, and it was 
an art which he somehow disdained to 
acquire. The fault, beyond doubt, was 
the outcome of his extreme youth, and 
of his habit, even in Paris (and what an 
orgy of a Paris it was then !), of mingling 
as little as possible with the social world, 
the sole school for the development of 
the defensive faculties. Such a lack, in 
such a character, was predestined to be 
righted with advancing years. While 
the reproach existed it was fully con- 
fessed, and it colored all his judgments 
upon himself : it was entirely just that 
he should have deprecated, as he did, 
the major responsibilities urged upon 
him in the October of 1793. Almost 
the last words of Louis de Lescure to 
his cousin were to assure him that if he, 
Lescure, lived, his chief care would be to 
help La Rochejaquelein overcome this 
ill-placed timidity, which belied the true 
masterfulness within him, and which 



87 

made it impossible to curb factional in- 
trigue. 

It is to be observed, that throughout 
the campaign in Brittany, no blunder 
has ever been imputed to Henri. He 
guessed at a science to which others had 
made the painful approximation of 
study. His own vision was so clear, so 
free of prejudice, that he saw at once 
what was to be done. His sagacity, 
when things were left in his own hands, 
was simply amazing : for we do not ex- 
pect sagacity from dare-devils. But he 
had a mistaken humility which forbade 
him to apply his great force of will, when 
the question arose of overruling age and 
numbers. His fear that he should not 
know how to silence those who opposed 
him proved but too accurate. Catheii- 
neau's death closed the first of the three 
periods of the war, as his own death 
closed the second ; and up to the hour 
when " the honest and the perfect man " 



of Pin-en-Mauges gave back his great 
spirit, there was no rivalry nor internal 
strife in his camp. But by the time 
" the son of Monsieur de La Rochejaque- 
lein " stood up to direct the graybeards 
of his staff, the general concord about 
him^ was by several degrees less angelic. 
The farther north the army strayed the 
more irksome became his position, for 
his steadfast conviction was against the 
expediency of trying to reach Granville 
at all. When, after the affair of Chateau- 
Gontier, a unique opportunity arose to 
retrace the march and re-establish head- 
quarters in the Socage, it went hard in- 
deed with Henri that none would listen 
to him. Again, at Laval, he would have 
pushed through Kleber's disorganized 
forces, towards the safe though smoking 
labyrinths at home ; but, misled by 
some vague encouraging rumor, the ma- 
jority clamored to push on. Through- 
out this unhappy time, when his light 



89 

heart was sickening with rebuffs and de- 
lays, there came to him a growing pru- 
dence and calm. He learned to cover 
a rout, to reap the full fruit of a victo- 
ry. Many of the elder subofficers who 
watched him were touched and com- 
forted, during the hot fourteen hours 
at Chateau - Gontier, where he forbore 
his old impetuous charges, but rode 
close to his column, clearing up the con- 
fusion, hindering the bravest from ad- 
vancing alone, and holdingthe disciplined 
musketeers together ; so as to remind 
-more than one of the tradition of Conde, 
in his invincible youth, at Rocroy. 



f 




iHE blue sea-horizon showed 
no sign of an English sail, 
though the firing was heard 
at Jersey; there were tid- 
ings neither from " le roi 
Georges" nor from the absent princes of 
France. When the insurgents, driven 
forth from Granville by flame and sword, 
started to return, they found the country 
which they had just conquered reoccu- 
pied by their enemies. They had to con- 
test their way back to the Loire-barrier, as 
if they were breaking virgin ground. At 
Avranches there was a mutiny, caused by 
a rather ridiculous suspicion of treason in 
Talmont and the ambitious Abbe Bern- 
ier. At Pontorson, where the streets had 
been choked with dead for many days, 



the army routed the Blues ; Foret, the 
first brand in the burning at Saint Flo- 
rent, fell there ; no quarter was given nor 
taken. A tremendous battle followed at 
Dol. Talmont sustained the siege with 
superb courage. Not a few of the fight- 
ing corps were sinking already from 
homesickness, exhaustion, and hunger. 
While there was a single squad to stand 
by him, Henri fought like a lion; and 
then, alone and seemingly numb with 
despair, he turned about, with folded 
arms, and faced the battery. It was ow- 
ing wholly to the exhortations of Abbe 
Doussin of Sainte-Marie-de-Rhe, and to 
the resolution of the women, that the 
troops rallied nobly and wrested three 
successive victories from their foes. 
Yet again would Henri have struck out 
as far as Rennes, thence in a straight 
line south ; and yet again he was forced 
to see the acceptance of a crazy project, 
whereby the roundabout route of Octo- 



ber was to be retraced inch by inch. 
" You deny me in conference ; you aban- 
don me on the field !" he could well say, 
with something like wrath flushing his 
young cheek. The highways were one 
horrible open grave ; the winter weather 
was cruelly cold ; desertions set in ; fam- 
ine and pestilence came upon them. At 
Angers, Henri would fain have quickened 
the lagging spirits of his old comrades ; 
the guns having made a small breach in 
the town -walls, he, with Forestier of 
Pommeraie-sur- Loire, who was never far 
from his side, and two others, flung 
themselves into it. Not a soul rallied to 
their defence. A miserable huddled 
mass, the army fell back on Bauge, and 
now, unable to seize a permanent advan- 
tage, ran hither and thither, ever away 
from the Loire. At the bridge of La 
Fleche, Henri, fording the stream with 
a small picked body of horsemen, over- 
came the garrison by an adroit move. 



and there was a flicker of great hope. 
But the peasants who began the war 
were weary, weary. Too truly the tide 
of disaster had set in. 

In the city of Mans, at the end of the 
only road open, were food, warmth, and 
rest. The exiles ate, drank, and slept ; 
slept, drank, and ate again. It seemed 
as if nothing could rouse them more. 
Marceau,Miiller, Tilly, and Westermann's 
light cavalry were closing on them. 
Prostrate and drunken, the Royalist sur- 
vivors lay inert as stones. But Henri's 
frantic energy (" he was like a madman," 
says Madame de La Rochejaquelein) 
once more assembled a desperate hand- 
ful, under himself, Marigny, Forestier, 
and the Breton, Georges Cadoudal, A 
bitter and awful fight it was — a scene of 
din and smoke and blind tumult, surging 
about the bloody gates by moonlight. 
Twice Westermann wavered and charged 
again. Two-thirds of the forlorn rem- 



94 

nant of the journeying army laid down 
their lives. In the deserted town thou- 
sands of old men, women, and children 
were slaughtered, amid jeers and fury 
and the patter of grape-shot. Exhaust- 
ed, and with a heart like lead within 
him, the commander-in-chief spurred to 
the side of the widowed Marchioness of 
Lescure, who, seated on horseback, hung 
at the outskirts of the forces. (Madame 
de Bonchamp, under the same affec- 
tionate protection of La Rochejaquelein 
and D'Autichamp, had been ordered, 
with her two little ones, to withdraw). 
She took his hand solemnly. " I thought 
you were dead, Henri," she sighed— and 
her sequence of speech was worthy both 
of him and of her, " for we are beaten." 
" Indeed, I wish I were dead," he an- 
swered. He knew that La Vendee had 
had its death-blow before him. 

So ended the march into Brittany. No 
coward Bourbon appeared to lead and 



95 

comfort his believers ; the emigrant aris- 
tocracy, " effeminated by a long peace," 
and scattered among the European capi- 
tals, shrunk from reviving their own faint- 
ing cause ; the imperfect overtures with 
Pitt and Dundas, until too late, were of no 
avail. The Vendeans were forty leagues 
from home, famished, diseased, betrayed, 
burdened with a host of the useless and 
the weak; and let it be written that in 
this plight they took twelve cities, won 
seven battles, destroyed more than twen- 
ty thousand Republicans, and captured 
one hundred cannon. It is a wonderful 
two months' record : a failure such as 
bemeans most conquests. And while 
Maine and the Breton country were 
overrun, when there were so many to 
nurse and shelter, so many mouths to 
feed, it is to be noted that no pillage was 
legalized. La Vendee paid its last penny 
for what it took, and when that was spent 
issued notes in the King's name, payable 



96 

at a four-and-a-half per cent, interest at 
the Restoration. 

For the last time Henri led a masterly 
retreat through Craon and Saint Mars, 
too rapid, alas ! for the dying feet of 
many. The Loire was to be recrossed 
at Ancenis on the sixteenth of December. 
The Republican troops were on the far- 
ther side and all about ; not so much as 
a raft was to be hired for pawns. Two 
pleasure-boats were seized on adjacent 
ponds and carried to the river. Henri, 
Stofilet, and La Ville-Bauge in one, young 
De Langerie and eighteen men in the 
other, succeeded in launching themselves, 
with the intention of capturing and tow- 
ing back some hay-laden skiffs on the op- 
posite shore. The current was rapid and 
strong ; the patrols opened fire ; a gun- 
boat descended the channel and sank 
the skiffs ; the mournful peasants, sep- 
arated from their generals, lost the 
chance of following, and disbanded in 



universal disorder and terror. The 
army Catholic and Royal, driven back 
on Nort, and relying on Fleuriot as its 
provisionary commander, saw Henri de 
La Rochejaquelein no more. 

7 




I HE fugitives, fortunately, 
landed in safety, and wan- 
dered all day through the 
fields. The Republic, an- 
gered at the strategies that 
so long held its strength at bay from 
the footpaths, hedges, and queer monot- 
onous bush-places which had provided 
shelter to the rebels and pitfalls to its 
own baffled soldiery, was literally clear- 
ing the neighborhood out, and burning 
east and west down to the very grass. 
The houses were in ashes ; the inhabit- 
ants had taken to the woods ; the lowing 
of the homeless ^cattle filled the wind. 
Desolation yet more complete, a des- 
olation known to wolves and carrion- 
crows, was to fall upon La Vendee. 



99 

After twenty-four hours, traversing sev- 
eral parishes and meeting no sign of life, 
Henri and his companions found a lately- 
deserted barn, and threw themselves on 
the straw. The farmer stole in from the 
thicket to tell them that the Blues were 
on the trail. "We may be murdered, 
but we must sleep," was the response. 
They were incapable of resistance. The 
Blues, probably sent out from Chollet 
by the tireless Poche-Durocher, came 
promptly. They were also a small party, 
apparently greatly fatigued, and they lay 
down with their guns on the same heap 
of straw, not two yards away, and de- 
parted, unsuspecting, ere dawn. Their 
poor bedfellows, thankful for their im- 
munity, crept forth and roamed on. 
They would have perished, had they 
not, with the strength of despair, at- 
tacked a relay, and seized bread and 
meat. They had news by chance of 
the last flash of Vendean courage at 



Savenay, under Fleuriot and Marigny, 
when the hostile cannon boomed A7nen 
to the long psalm of heroic pain. Out 
of nearly one hundred thousand who 
crossed the Loire the season preceding, 
less than seven thousand remained. 

The little party disbanded. Those 
who accompanied Henri reached Bois- 
vert de Combrand, and passed a mel- 
ancholy Christmas with Mademoiselle 
de La Rochejaquelein, still concealed 
and in solitude. Here Henri, who was 
not well, fell into the deepest dejection 
he had ever known, thinking still of 
Mans and of the friends gone before 
him, thinking more of the hopeless to- 
morrow, now that the chartered Terror, 
a tightening ring of myriad evil faces, 
led by Carrier and Francastel, was clos- 
ing in on the wretched west. His aunt, 
the best stoic of a stoic family, roused 
him from his lethargy. She would have 
him leave her, and risk himself once 



again. " If thou diest, Henri," she said, 
with the reticence which, in her, was rich 
with meaning, " surely thou hast my es- 
teem as well as my regret." This was 
the sort of godspeed which could not 
fail to influence him. He went, at this 
time, to La Durbelliere alone, perhaps 
conscious that it was his solemn farewell 
look at the woods dear to his infancy. A 
detachment of Blues dogged him. He 
heard the hoofs in time to save himself. 
His neglected arm, causing him much 
suffering, was still in a sling. Always 
light-footed and firm of muscle, he 
swung himself up as best he could to 
the ruined lintel of the court -yard 
gate, and dropping inside the wall, 
without dislodging a stone, he lay fiat, 
and watched his fowlers debate, pass 
under, and clatter ofif, without their 
bird. This opportune reminder of how 
much he was still sought and feared, de- 
termined his immediate action. Noth- 



ing but the jaws of the guillotine await- 
ed him if he failed. 

He learned that while Stofflet was al- 
ready bravely combating in the recesses 
of the Bocage, Charette was advancing 
towards Maulevrier. Chafing to be sep- 
arated from the rallying men, Henri and 
his comrades set out on the twenty- 
eighth of December, walking all night, 
to reach the camp. Charette was break- 
fasting in his tent. He received Henri 
coldly, nor did he ask him to the table. 
They had some conversation, and the 
younger general withdrew to the house 
of a neighbor for refreshment. When 
the drums began to beat, Charette cross- 
ed over to the spot where Henri was 
standing. " You will follow me ?" he 
asked. Henri made a foolish and haugh- 
ty answer : " T am accustomed to be fol- 
lowed !" and turned away. Here was 
an instance of the jealousy and disunion 
which had affected the chiefs of the in- 



I03 

surrection. Though Henri was the le- 
gitimate commander of all the forces of 
the main army, Charette had a rather 
ignoble precedent in his favor, inasmuch 
as his little legion of the Marais had 
never been fused in the main army ; and 
a long despotism, pure enough in its 
purpose, had made him averse to any 
compromise. It seems scarcely credible 
that, from Cathelineau's time onward, 
Charette had ruled in Lower Poitou 
his own schismatical twenty thousand, 
which never crossed the Loire, which 
never even co-operated with the other 
forces, save at Nantes, where they were 
beaten by Beysser, and at Lugon, where 
they were beaten by Tuncq. Could the 
two have agreed to march together on 
the capital, the counter-revolution, Na- 
poleon declared, would have set in nearly 
twenty years sooner. 

The peasants, flocking meanwhile from 
the environs to join Charette, crowded 



ab^ut with welcoming shouts of " M'sieu 
Henri !" before he had so much as spo- 
ken. He was pleased, as they were ; his 
eager spirit revived; he left the Cheva- 
lier to his own devices in his own coun- 
ty. Assembling the new battalion at 
Neuvy, he marched all night, and carried 
a Republican post eight leagues distant. 
Then began his most indefatigable mi- 
nor campaign. He attacked remote 
points to prevent surmise ; he dropped 
down on widely-scattered garrisons; he 
harassed pickets, captured provisions, 
convoys, and horses ; he intercepted 
Cordelier's rear-guards on perilous roads. 
His name was in everybody's mouth at 
Paris ; he spread fresh fear abroad with 
every success of these wild days. At 
Salboeuf Castle and in Vezins his aston- 
ishing boldness sprang into final play. 
He was wise in not yet collecting his 
men, and hazarding a general contest. 
His troop of eight hundred increasing 



J 05 

daily, he became, by sheer thrust and 
parry, master of the surrounding coun- 
try ; and at last he prepared to besiege 
Mortagne and Chatillon. His head- 
quarters were in the forest of Vezins ; 
his house was a hut of boughs. About 
it he went and came, a familiar figure in 
disguise, with long fair clustering hair, 
his arm in a rough sling, a great woollen 
cap and peasant's blouse for his regi- 
mentals, the little symbolic heart worn 
outside, as of old. He kept his ad- 
herents, poor and threadbare like him- 
self, continually under exercise. Tidings 
came, too, to cheer them all, that in the 
north the Chouans were aroused. 

It was the twenty-eighth of January, 
1794. Henri had a skirmish at Nouaille, 
and won. After the enemy were routed, 
he saw, far to the right of his little army, 
two grenadiers stooping behind a bush. 
Some who were with him aimed at them. 
He bade them desist ; he wished to 



question them. He went forward, alone, 
with the Vendean formula : " Surrender 
and be spared !" A voice from his own 
ranks, either not heard or not heeded, 
warned him to stop short. He was rid- 
ing a richly-caparisoned horse which he 
had seized, and he had been able that 
morning to resume his general's coat 
and sash — things which made him con- 
spicuous and proclaimed him aloud ; for 
one of the Blues, recognizing him, with 
inconceivable celerity rose and fired. 
Henri had put out his hand, with a sud- 
den sense of danger, to disarm his assail- 
ant; but on the instant, and without a 
cry, he fell from his saddle, dead. 



4. 




HE legend of Henri de La 
Rochejaquelein did not end 
with his life. Says the 
Count of C , an emi- 
grant (author of the graph- 
ic and erratic pamphlet entitled Un 
Sejour de Dix Mots e7i France) : "It 
was in a prosperous hour, and shortly 
after the fortunate expedition of which 
I have been speaking, that I had the 
pleasure of joining the Royalist army. 
On every side I saw tears only, and I 
heard but sighs : Henri had lately per- 
ished on the field of honor." From this 
anonymous gentleman comes fragmen- 
tary testimony on a subject once of some 
mystery and conjecture. He had em- 
braced, or helped to create, a rumor that 



a woman headed the young chief's troops 
as soon as he had fallen. He declares 
that, unwilling to survive him, yet burn- 
ing to avenge him, she flung herself upon 
the advancing Blues, and so expired. 
And he lends her, moreover, the soldier- 
ly distinction of reposing by her hero 
henceforward. Now, as the Count of 

C is the only one in the world to 

print this story, it may be worth while 
to quote, for the sake of contradict- 
ing it, a passage of that cloying racial 
eloquence which has never the Saxon 
shame of speaking a little more than it 
feels : "And thou, O La Rochejaquelein, 
thou the Rinaldo of the new Crusade, 
the terror of infidels and the hope of 
Christians, thou whom nature had dow- 
ered with so much worth and so much 
charm ! look down upon the tears of thy 
brethren-in-arms ; listen to the sorrow- 
ings of the whole army ; see the glorious 
tomb raised to thy memory; bid thy 



log 

spirit hover nigh among the cypresses, 
to count the trophies which thy victori- 
ous comrades hang there day by day, 
the garlands which thy countrywomen, 
fair and sad, wreathe there forever ; hear 
the hymns sung for thy sake ; watch the 
young and buoyant legion sworn to per- 
petuate thy name and to accomplish thy 
vengeance ; read the inscriptions which 
passers-by grave on the trees in memory 
of thee ; rejoice to know that thy sweet 
friend sleeps at thy side, wept, cherished, 
reverenced, less because she was lovely, 
good, and bright than because she was 
once thy heart's happiness and thy tri- 
umph's pulse and centre; ah! behold 
and consider all these things at once, 
and let the palm which is thine in Heav- 
en be set about and made fairer, if that 
can be, with all the bays won well of old 
of earth." The soft music of this ex- 
tract, crossed with appeals to the super- 
mundane vanity of the most modest of 



mortals, is a sufficient voucher that with 
the real La Rochejaquelein it has no 
commerce whatever. It was indeed true 
that some martial girl, leading a compa- 
ny during the winter, received her death- 
blow in the neighborhood of Tremen- 
tines. The nonsense of her being Henri's 
sweetheart probably owed its origin to 
the same singular Republican inventive- 
ness which, long after the fight of Vrine 
which laid Jeanne Robin low, continued 
to call her Jeanne de Lescure and sister 
of her commander, who might have 
wished any sister of his, did such exist, 
to be as pure and as brave. 

There are instances, in the long deal- 
ings of eternity with time, when a man 
is given whose life is an imagination not 
to be matched in the arts ; but such a 
one is usually spoiled, like Icarus, by the 
heats of an alien planet : we cannot take 
him as he is ; we must needs relax and 
refashion him, and make of the abstract 



idyll a sujet theatrique. Henri de La 
Rochejaquelein, zigzagging in the teeth 
of the enemy, doing deeds with his own 
hands which are not common in salons ; 
Henri, with his slender height, his shy 
caressing voice and smile, having no ten- 
derer talisman to carry than the sign of 
the cross, no parting look at anything 
more responsive than a torn white flag, — 
such a Henri, jarring with prescriptive 
ideas, calls for reform. It is ungracious 
that a chevalier of twenty should have 
no leisure for a personal romance ; and 
therefore, for his own credit's sake, that 
he may remain a consistent and compre- 
hensible chevalier, kind gossip makes 
him the gift of a lady ! almost as beautiful 
there as Briseis by Agamemnon. Nay; 
more sincere tradition must leave him 
as he was, with no true-love yet at his 
side. For many years, under the boughs 
of Brissoniere and Haie Bureau, there 
was some one, verily, to share the hal- 



lowed six feet of ground with Henri ; 
some one sleeping quietly as the child 
Hermenee in old days, while yet over 
the two virginal hearts their common 
doom was hanging: the bride of the 
irony of this world, the ungrateful miscre- 
ant who had slain him. 

When the Vendeans, transported with 
fury, rushed forward and cut the gren- 
adier down, there was in the air the 
noise of an approaching hostile column. 
In the utmost distress the detachment 
at Nouaille, to whose command Stofilet 
now succeeded, enjoined it upon a trusty 
farmer to bury their chief in a hasty 
grave. They would not have the gren- 
adier parted from him, that his uniform 
might be a silent defence against profa- 
nation and conceal the identity of Henri, 
who, stripped of his own insignia, had 
the enemy's cap and cockade drawn over 
his forehead. Thrice were the two 
moved from pit to pit in the lonely 



neighborhood a mile or two from Choi- 
let, and always by the loyal, secret, and 
shrewd hands of the farmer Girard. 

Madame de Sapinaud de Bois-Huguet 
says that the Royalists at large supposed 
Henri to have been seriously hurt only, 
and carried to a place of safety, up to 
the treaty of peace signed by Sapinaud 
and Charette. This allegation alone 
would confound the ready rhetoric of 

the Count of C and the " glorious 

tomb" which never existed. Great con- 
fusion as to the date of Henri's death is 
found in all contemporary accounts, 
caused by the prolonged lack of calen- 
dars; and uncertainty of the fact itself 
bewildered those interested without. 
Henri's mother knew nothing of her 
loss until the following summer. Mean- 
while StofHet temporarily carried on 
energetic operations in his colleague's 
name. The rumor of the truth reached 
Paris slowly, and it bred so great a 



doubt in Turreau's mind that he wrote 
Cordelier to secure proof, by discover- 
ing and digging up the body. Thanks 
to the foresight of others, no such in- 
dignity befell what was Henri. But how 
little Turreau recognized the splendid 
oblique flattery of this order, which, as 
Cretineau-Joly remarks, was accorded 
only once before in history, and then by 
the Romans to Hannibal ! 

In 1816, twenty-two years after, by the 
piety of Mademoiselle Louise de La 
Rochejaquelein, upheld by the most 
minute and accurate converging testi- 
mony of eye-witnesses, the remains of 
her brother, easily recognizable by the 
tall frame and the bullet-hole through 
the head, were officially disinterred, and 
laid under the altar of Saint Sebastian, 
in the old church of Saint Peter at 
Chollet. And within the year, the centre 
of a solemn and moving spectacle, borne 
by his former comrades and the returned 



exiles of his family, amid the muffled 
music of the march, the salutation of the 
Latin liturgy, and the proud rapture of 
public tears, Henri de La Rochejaquelein 
was brought home to the parish ceme- 
tery of Saint Aubin de Baubigne. He was 
buried at the right hand of his brother 
Louis, who, with another Cathelineau 
and another Charette, had died at his 
post in June of 1815, just before Water- 
loo, at the head of the Vendean army 
raised to oppose the Emperor Napoleon. 
"Accident," sa3^s Genoude very sweetly, 
"took upon herself the writing of their 
epitaphs, and sowed in abundance over 
their dust what is known as the Achilles- 
flower." " That is more touching to 
me," adds Madame de Genlis, in a note 
to the Memoires of Madame de Bon- 
champ, " than the legendary laurel which 
sprung from Virgil's grave." 

Again, in 1857, all the precious dust in 
that little tomb was gathered into the 



ii6 

vault of the new church near, where 
Henri Hes with very many of his high- 
hearted Icindred ; and with the venerated 
gentlewoman who was his cousin both 
by her first marriage and by birth, and 
who became, after his death, his brother's 
wife: Victoire de Donnissan, his junior 
by three months, his dear friend of the 
camp and the fireside, his survivor of 
over sixty yea'rs. In the still aisle- 
chapel above them, the rich light of a 
memorial window slides down on del- 
icate sculptured marbles, through the 
figures of the dying Maccabees; and 
around the walls, graven like a triumphal 
scroll, is the cry of the same Hebrew 
martyrs that it is far, far better to fall in 
battle, than to let ruin come upon the 
things that are holy. The spotless name 
of La Rochejaquelein must, with the ebb 
of this century, be withdrawn from 
among men ; but whoso fears for it is 
not wise. Every villager to-day, passing 



117 

the low sepulchral outer door between 
Le Rabot and the inn, affectionately 
raises his cap, and, walking in the ways 
of his fathers, forgets not the prayer, 
which, as some yet think with Sir 
Thomas Browne, is " more noble than a 
history." 



^ 




HE strength and beauty of 
the cause vanished with 
Henri. The war did not 
end for more than a twelve- 
month ; fresh recruits car- 
ried it on with wonderful persistence 
and pluck, under Charette, still in the 
Marais, Stofflet in the interior, and 
the Chouan leaders in Brittany. But 
towards the close, itself the disciple of 
accursed experience, it became merely 
"a war of ruffians, carried on by treach- 
ery," and accomplished in carnage and 
wrath ; its last flutter on Quiberon sands, 
its last allaying, far gentler than any an- 
ticipation of it, from the steady hand of 
General Hoche. 
"So quick bright things come to confusion !" 



The Vendean captains were patriots, as 
is well said in the preface to Mr. George J. 
Hill's admirable little book," whose^<a;/r/^ 
was not of this world," Cathelineau, with 
his thirty- six kinsmen, Bonchamp and 
Lescure, gloriously perished while yet 
hope was high ; D'Elbee, in a sick-chair 
in his own garden, laden with abuse, and 
bearing himself gallantly, was shot at 
Noirmoutiers ; Mondyon and other faith- 
ful youths "died into life" at Angers, 
bound in couples like dogs ; Stofiiet paid 
the wages of his exceeding loyalty in the 
same rocky town ; Bernard de Marigny 
was cut off in his prime by the acquies- 
cence of Stoffiet, who was under an evil 
influence, and by the orders of Charette, 
to the bitter sorrow, aftervv^ards, of the 
former; Charette himself, having made 
terms to his advantage in March of 1795, 
at Nantes, and renewing hostilities for 
what he thought to be sufficient cause, 
though offered a thousand pounds and 



free passage to England for his good- 
will, kept up to the last the unequal 
struggle with Travot, and, closing a ca- 
reer of signal splendor, was taken and 
put to death, lion-stanch, with a salute 
to the King upon his lips. As soon as 
his grave was dug, General Hoche with- 
drew his forces. The war was finished. 
It is the word of homage to be spoken 
of the Vendeans, that they fought long 
with honor and with pity, in the face 
of unnameable brutality and treachery. 
During the first Royalist occupation of 
Chollet, when it was for a while Cathel- 
ineau's gay and free little capital, full of 
festivity and transient peace, the public 
treasury, known to be packed, was not 
touched. Tributes to facts of this kind 
are to be gathered from the pages of 
every hostile or neutral annalist. And 
Madame de La Rochejaquelein recalled, 
for the amusement of another generation, 
her own amusement at Bressuire in 1793, 



when the rueful masters of the situation 
complained to her that they had no 
money to buy tobacco, it never having 
occurred to them to seize it in the 
shops ! It is clear that persons who so 
scrupled to appropriate the goods the 
gods provided, were not destined easily 
to become experts in wanton slaughter, 
which relieved no need of their honest 
stomachs. The Republicans began their 
business at once with the master-stroke 
of homicide, and forecasted the immortal 
axiom of De Quincey, that when once a 
man indulges in murder he soon gets to 
think little of robbing and lying, of drink- 
ing and Sabbath -breaking, and even of 
incivility and procrastination. But in 
La Vendee they had a breed of misgiv- 
ing hearts. Marigny, indeed, mild and 
brotherly towards his own, was as a de- 
mon towards his foes ; Charette, the very 
Charette who had put a stop to the 
cruelties of Souchu at the beginning, 



was, with D'Elbee, the first to sanction 
reprisals. But CatheUneau, Bonchamp, 
Lescure, La Rochejaquelein and priests 
innumerable stood then, and stand al- 
ways, ranged on the side of Christ-like 
charity. 

To any student of the great Revolu- 
tion not much need be said of the un- 
equal exchange of grim attentions. The 
Blues outdid themselves on Vendean 
territory. Arrest, with them, meant an 
immediate commission to explore the 
spheres. The burials alive at Clisson, 
the holocaust at Vezins, the atrocities 
in the wood of Blanche Couronne, the 
week-long fusillade at Savenay, West- 
ermann's thousands shot at Angers, Car- 
rier's drowned at Nantes, the hellish pol- 
icy of Commaire, Crignon, Amey, Du- 
four — these were the things which crazed 
the gentler rebels until they, too, learned 
to throw forgiveness by, as a coin hollow 
and vile. In May of 1794, Vimeux, then 



in command, went to lay their country 
waste. Only Victor Hugo's pen could 
fitly portray the results. The Convention 
desired report of a landscape without a 
man, without a house, without a tree ; in 
due season they had it, true to the letter. 
It was Westermann's boast to the Com- 
mittee of Public Safety that he had 
crushed the children under the horses' 
hoofs, and massacred the women, who 
should bring forth no more "brigands ;" 
that not a prisoner could be laid to his 
charge, for he had exterminated them ; 
that La Vendee was heaped, like the 
pyramids, with bodies. At Rennes the 
children were made to fire upon their 
parents : it was a novel, awkward, and 
lengthy proceeding, entirely to the minds 
of its originators. At Savenay, hundreds 
were lured under cover by a promise of 
amnesty, and as they entered, they were 
shot down. An adjutant was brought 
to La Rochejaquelein, during the last 



days of his life, in whose pocket was an 
order to repeat this brilHant joke. Dur- 
ing that January, also, at Barbastre, fifteen 
hundred insurgents capitulated, and were 
cheated in the same way. What wonder 
if, outside Laval, with horror on horror 
bruited in their ears, the peasants de- 
stroyed a whole battalion of Mayence 
men who were laying down their arms ? 
But after, marching on Angers from An- 
train, they sent to Rennes one hundred 
and fifty prisoners, with the significant 
message that this was the sort of ven- 
geance taken by choice for old injuries. 
It was the work of the kindly incumbent 
of Sainte-Marie-de-Rhe. On the morn- 
ing of this release. Monsieur de Hargues, 
for whom Henri (who had once a hot 
quarrel with him) interceded passion- 
ately, mounted the scaffold. For the 
bitter deeds of Souchu at Machecould 
the army did voluntary penance. Until 
it was practically disorganized, it did 



not sin in the same way again. We 
are aware how pretty a burlesque be- 
tween nominal captor and captives came 
ofif at Bressuire. And in Thouars, Fon- 
tenay, and many towns like them, inhab- 
ited by Republicans and revolutionists 
who trembled for their fate, no violence 
whatever was wreaked. 

A truly humorous retaliation was made, 
at the suggestion of the Marquis of Don- 
nissan, at Fontenay. There were four 
thousand prisoners, and no forts nor 
cells to hold them. Should they be loosed 
they could not be trusted on parole. 
(What a thing for Frenchmen to know 
of Frenchmen !) To solve the difficulty 
their heads were shaved, so that if during 
the following weeks they again attempt- 
ed to fight, they might be caught and 
punished. The wild barbers had infinite 
entertainment out of this circumstance. 
La Rochejaquelein's clemency was a 
proverb. He waived the very show of 



126 

superiority, as when, at Bois-Grolleau, 
he made Tribert keep his proferred 
sword. As one who had accepted be- 
forehand the painfulest surprises of 
fate, he heard of the destruction of La 
DurbelHere without a sigh. Precisely 
the same danger which proved fatal to 
him, having rehearsed itself before him 
early in his career, and the pistol having 
missed fire, the marksman flung himself 
at his feet, crying out that he could now 
have his satisfaction. " That is to let 
thee live," was the Alexander-like reply, 
made over and over to those who thus 
fell into his power. He was destined to 
perish through his belief in the honor of 
others. The best acknowledgment of 
the influence which he had upon his 
headstrong band, was that although 
they slew, in his absence, the Republic- 
an officer who led the first raid upon his 
homestead, yet, when he was murdered 
by the hand of one of the two grena- 



diers, they spared the man who had not 
fired, because he had been offered mer- 
cy in Henri's last spoken word. The 
Marigny, who bore to his imminent 
misfortune the surname of an active 
Royalist, was so charmed with the spir- 
ited behavior of Richard Duplessis, made 
captive at the siege of Angers, that he 
sent him. back under escort to his own 
lines. La Rochejaquelein, never to be 
outdone in a handsome service, instantly 
freed two dragoons, with their arms, 
thanking him, and offering him, in the 
future, an exchange of any two prisoners 
for his one. " This was the only Repub- 
lican general," adds Madame de Lescure, 
"who had been wont to show us any 
humanity : he was killed that very day." 
Marceau and Quetineau, both scrupu- 
lously fair, deserve to share this mention 
of Bouin de Marigny. And to Kleber 
and Hoche, the knightliest of foemen, 
no acknowledgment would be too great. 



128 

Lescure himself was the consummate 
type of the early Christian : so tolerant, 
so self-controlling, that to be able to im- 
pute one vicious deed to him would be 
a gratification. " The Saint of Poitou," 
however, was once known to swear 
steadily for several minutes. An enemy, 
in action, having cocked a pistol within 
a rod of his menaced head, Lescure, fear- 
less and quick, dislodged the barrel with 
a swing of his sword, and told the aston- 
ished invader to go free. The Poitevins 
behind had a mind of their own on the 
subject, and presently cut the bold Blue 
to pieces. When the general learned 
how he had been obeyed, his rage was 
something to be remembered. This was 
the aristocrat who, when his ancestral 
halls were razed to the ground, would 
not burn Parthenay, which he had taken, 
not only lest it should be, on his part, a 
revenge for Clisson, but lest, being a pre- 
caution merely, it should disedify by 



129 

having the look of a revenge ! And it is 
a curious instance of the " governance of 
blood " in his most lovely character, that 
although he was invariably in the thick- 
est of the fight, his hand inflicted no 
wilful wound throughout the war, and 
that to his personal interference no fewer 
than twenty thousand owed their lives. 
Again, at the crossing of the Loire, in an 
hour of unexampled perplexity, between 
five and six thousand captives were in the 
hands of the migrating army, and shut 
in the Benedictine Abbey church, which 
still tops the crescent-shaped heights of 
Saint Florent-le-Vieil. There could be no 
question of transporting them ; the simp- 
lest expedient w^as to destroy them. Nor 
was this proposal made in cold blood, 
for the Marquis of Bonchamp was dying 
young from the last of many wounds, 
" for the sacred cause of the lilies," and 
his troops were in a frenzy of excitement 
and grief. Not an officer could be found 



to give the revolting order. The men 
had the guns already pointed at the 
doors, and the slaughter was about to 
begin, when Boncharap, apprised of 
what was pending, with his last breath 
commanded, as he had done before at 
Pallet, that the Blues should be spared. 
From the house where he lay the echo 
rolled along the crowd : " Quarter for 
the prisoners ; quarter ! It is Bon- 
champ's order !" They were delivered. 
With the genuine Gallic sense of the 
apportioning of things, Bonchamp's gra- 
cious valedictory is inscribed upon his 
tomb, lifting its glorious outlines to-day 
in the transept of that very church, and 
bearing, in a free-will offering, the name 
of the sculptor, David d'Angers, whose 
father was among the ransomed soldiery. 
As to the amnesty, the Convention, 
guided by the advice of Merlin de Thion- 
ville, growled over it. " Freemen accept 
their lives from slaves ! 'Tis against the 



spirit of the Revolution, . . . Consign 
the unfortunate affair to oblivion." 
There was different speech in the Tem- 
ple. " Capet !" said the brute Simon to 
the wretched little King, when the news 
came of the crossing of the Loire, " if the 
Vendeans deliver you, what will you do 
first }" " Forgive you !" replied the child. 
La Vendee, forbearing wrong, and seek- 
ing after righteousness, has no mean 
martyrology. What people in the mod- 
ern world so sweetly rival the holy race 
of whom it is said in the Pharsalia that 
they hurried on their own extermination, 
and, brimming with life, spilled it as a 
libation to the gods ? But since these 
others were not pagan, there is a yet 
more endearing and more becoming 
word : "Sterna fac cum Sanctis tuz's in 
gloria nufnerari I" 



t 




^a 



T is a brief and moving story, 
and it is over. Small com- 
ment is to be made at any- 
time, on promise cut short, 
on the burning of Apollo's 
laurel - bough. La Rochejaquelein of 
Poitou, with his goodness, genius, health, 
breeding, wealth, and beauty — who in 
his day would have measured for him 
the renown which seemed so nigh and 
so wide ? And the first reward of that 
fine heart and brain was a wild grave in 
the grassy trenches with the assassin ; 
no dues, no amends, no appeal, beyond 
that piteous ending. He was a boy, rash 
and romantic, as boys are, and so pyro- 
technically French that some must smile 
at him. His chivalry went to the up- 



133 

holding of kings ; all he did has a sole 
value of loyalty, and the application of 
it is open to dispute. But his spirit, dis- 
entangled from old circumstances of 
action, is that which helps humanity 
towards the dawn, and sets oppressions 
aside with bad by-gone dreams ; a spirit 
infinitely suggestive and generative^ then 
and now a durable sign of hope. 

It is difficult to account for the halo 
which gathers about such heads, and 
stays, to make of a sometime aimless 
intelligence a vision of extreme force 
and charm to the youth of his own 
land. Nor ought we try to account 
for it. Henri de La Rochejacquelein is 
one with whom statistics and theories 
have distant dealings. He is a fond in- 
congruity, a compliment to human nat- 
ure almost as great as it can bear. He 
has precisely the look, language, and 
physical radiance of the demigods : we 
infer how, from his counterparts, the 



early myths grew. Wherever there is a 
liberal air, and discipline, behold, the 
demigods are again ; and the senses no 
longer boggle at them. They rise often, 
and repeat one another, preaching affir- 
mation, and inclining us to allow that 
what Greece and Japan have had, Eng- 
land has, Alaska and the Congo shall 
have. Stress must be laid upon heroes : 
they are the universal premise. Like 
Emerson's stars, they " light the world 
with their admonishing smile ;" they 
warn us, if we will not adore, at least not 
to deny that they shine forever. 

Among Henri de La Rochejacquelein's 
peers there were those who would have 
been men of weight and of mark in any 
career. But perhaps he, more sensitive 
and solitary, had no such adaptabilities 
to bear him out. He was not twenty- 
two when the dark curtain was rung 
down upon him. To regret it, is to show 
small appreciation of the masterly con- 



sistency which Fate sometimes allows 
herself. No spectator of the little drama 
enacted within the Revolution can for- 
get how dominant, distinct, unrepeated, 
this artful image of Henri burns itself in 
upon the memory. To wish him age 
and a competency were superstition. 
Mark how, even in her hasty finishing 
touches, Nature did not bungle with 
him. She rounds out her white ideal. 
She leaves us convinced that living a 
span, and dying in the hurly-burly, he 
best fulfilled himself. He is placed in 
an allotted light perfectly kind to him, 
perfectly soft and clear to the looker-on. 
Virtually, what did he amount to? 
What testimony of him is left ? To the 
man of facts, who asks the questions, 
the answers are : Nothing and None. 
There is a laconic apology in the Spaitish 
Gypsy : 

"The greatest gift the hero leaves his race 
Is to have been a hero." 



136 

Such a one makes a jest of values ; he 
has the freedom of every city ; he need 
pay no taxes ; he cripples criticism ; he 
can do without a character ; theology 
itself will not exact faith and good works 
from him. This Henri lived with his 
whole soul. His interest to us now is 
that he blazed with genuine fire, and 
played no tricks with his individuality. 
Among the serious war-worn leaders of 
the insurrection he stands, a fairy prince, 
with a bright absurd glamour. Never 
was anybody more like the fiction of an 
artist's brain. He is all that children 
look for in a tale, and he has no moral. 
He is the embodiment of " VmexpHcable 
Ve7ideey 

He was made to despatch this world, 
like an errand or a game. He had no 
sovereign interests here of his own ; 
rather was he his brother's keeper. A 
sort of rich unreason shot him past the 
work, the musing, the sight -seeing for 



self, and the pleasant banquets over 
which men linger. Careless for the 
making of a name, for the gain of expe- 
rience, even for the duty of prolonging 
his usefulness, he chose the first course 
which he believed honorable, and to 
which he could give his heart ; and so 
stumbled on death. The war had a 
thousand sanctions in his eyes. His 
enlisting was honest and humble. If 
he flashed into the most unexampled 
comet-like activity before he had been 
long apprenticed, it was merely that he 
warmed with the motion, that he felt 
sure at last of himself, and so blazoned 
abroad his content and comprehension 
of life. He is less flesh and blood than 
a magnificent quibble for all the phil- 
osophies of the cold schools. He repre- 
sents, in the economy of things, the 
waste which is thrift, the daring which is 
prudence, the folly which is wisdom in- 
effable. 



138 

Despite the white heat of enthusiasm, 
which is apt to singe the susceptibiUties 
of others, his, at least, was a modest, 
merry, and balanced mind. Ranked as 
he will be always with his Cathelineau, 
Bonchamp, and Lescure, he differs sharp- 
ly from them : that is, he was farther 
from a saint or a conventional hero. 
None the less is he a type of young 
French manhood ere it had grown 
wholly modern and complex ; the last 
of a single-minded race, soldiers by ac- 
cident, helpers and servers of men by 
choice. In short, he was a Vendean, 
behind his century in shrewdness, ahead 
of it in joy ; a straggler from the pageant 
of the ancestral crusaders, having all the 
thirst for justice, the rational gayety, 
the boyish bel air of the sworded squires 
of the Middle Ages. A phrase meant 
for Sidney will grace him : " God hath 
disdeigned the worlde of this most noble 
Spirit." Let him ride ever now in mem- 



ory, a beardless knight erect upon Fal- 
lowdeer, his white scarf around him, the 
nodding cockade of his foes behind ; 
women watching his lips for comfort and 
assurance, the happy Hermenee prattling 
between his knees; beautiful indeed, even 
in the smoke of war, with his oval face, 
his hale and winning aspect, his terse 
speech and candid ways : not the Count 
nor the General La Rochejaquelein, but 
" Master Henry, a hard hitter and a dear 
fellow," as his compatriots knew him, 
and as Froissart, his fittest chronicler, 
might have loved him. 



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